Assad shows human rights abusers everywhere how to commit atrocities with impunity

Assad shows human rights abusers everywhere how to commit atrocities with impunity

Bente Scheller writes: The regime has so far given no reason to assume that diplomacy alone will get it to change its behavior. Nor has it given any indication that it is willing to make concessions for a lasting peace. It could have offered or honored amnesties, but there isn’t one example of successful reconciliation from any province in Syria. The local cease-fires strategy embraced by the U.N. under then-Special Envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura delivered much of Syria…

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Can lab-grown brain organoids be ‘conscious’? Scientists may soon find out

Can lab-grown brain organoids be ‘conscious’? Scientists may soon find out

Anil Seth writes: In 2022 we will see brain organoids displaying dynamics that bear comparison with the complex activity patterns indicative of consciousness in humans. This will require us to rethink what counts as a brain signature of “consciousness” and will raise serious ethical issues about brainlike structures grown in the lab. Brain organoids are tiny, lab-grown bundles of neurons, derived from human stem cells, that display various properties of the developing human brain. In medicine, they provide much-needed biological…

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Behind Manchin’s opposition, a long history of fighting measures for tackling climate change

Behind Manchin’s opposition, a long history of fighting measures for tackling climate change

The New York Times reports: Senator Joe Manchin III on Monday cited a litany of issues that drove him to oppose President Biden’s $2 trillion Build Back Better bill, from Democrats’ refusal to attach work requirements to social benefits to their failure to raise tax rates on the rich. But left almost unsaid was the issue that has always propelled his political career as a Democratic maverick: climate change. The version of the bill that passed the House last month…

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Curtailing anonymity is a first step towards reducing online abuse

Curtailing anonymity is a first step towards reducing online abuse

Stephen Kinsella writes: We have come a long way from the optimism that surrounded the internet in the early 1990s. As Tim Berners-Lee has remarked several times, there was a ‘utopian’ view of its potential to democratise news and reinforce social cohesion. Indeed, only 10 years ago, we were celebrating the role that online communications played in the Arab Spring. Now, when the subject of social media is mentioned, it is far more often associated with organisations such as QAnon…

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Omicron sweeps across nation, now 73% of U.S. Covid cases

Omicron sweeps across nation, now 73% of U.S. Covid cases

The Associated Press reports: Omicron has raced ahead of other variants and is now the dominant version of the coronavirus in the U.S., accounting for 73% of new infections last week, federal health officials said Monday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention numbers showed nearly a six-fold increase in omicron’s share of infections in only one week. In much of the country, it’s even higher. Omicron is responsible for an estimated 90% or more of new infections in the…

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Trump implores supporters to take credit for the vaccines — even if they don’t want to take the vaccines

Trump implores supporters to take credit for the vaccines — even if they don’t want to take the vaccines

CNN reports: According to video tweeted by O’Reilly’s “No Spin News,” the former Fox News host says, “Both the President and I are vaxxed” and then asks Trump, “Did you get the booster?” “Yes,” Trump says to a smattering of boos in the audience. “Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” Trump says in the video, seemingly trying to quiet the boos. “That’s all right, it’s a very tiny group over there.” CNN has reached out to a Trump spokesperson for more…

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Coal in America: A legacy of environmental catastrophe

Coal in America: A legacy of environmental catastrophe

James Bruggers writes: Along the winding, two lane road that leads to Tracy Neece’s mountain in Floyd County, Kentucky, there’s no hint of the huge scars in the hills beyond the oaks and the pines. Green forests cover steep slopes on each side of the road, which turns from blacktop to dusty gravel. Modest homes are nestled into the bottomlands along a creek with gardens that grow corn and zucchini under a hot summer sun. The first sign of the…

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Biden should take Manchin’s deal right now

Biden should take Manchin’s deal right now

Jonathan Chait writes: Sunday morning, Joe Manchin threw a giant twist into the plot of the Biden presidency by announcing his opposition to the administration’s signature domestic agenda. But the new plot had a gaping hole: Biden noted that, a few days before walking away, Manchin had made a counteroffer to Biden at the White House. What was the counteroffer? And why did Biden reject it? The Washington Post fills in the answer. Manchin’s proposal included universal pre-kindergarten, an expansion…

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One shot to see the universe like never before

One shot to see the universe like never before

Marina Koren writes: In the beginning, the universe was dark. The Big Bang had electrified the cosmos into existence, and the new landscape buzzed with particles, chaotic and hot, before cooling off into a calm expanse of hydrogen and helium. Then something began to happen in the fog. Gravity drove pockets of gas to collapse in on themselves and ignite, creating the first stars. The radiant orbs began to cluster, forming the first galaxies: messy, misshapen things, not as polished…

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A relentless assault on the Amazon rainforest poses a threat to the planet

A relentless assault on the Amazon rainforest poses a threat to the planet

Georgina Gustin writes: The Amazon is enveloping and lush, a place of stupefying richness. But a powerful web of extractive forces is also at work here. Every day, thousands of miners, loggers, farmers and ranchers burn or cut roughly 10,000 acres of forest, working to satisfy a growing demand for the resources it contains. They are tiny cogs in a sprawling global machine that has destroyed nearly one-fifth of the Brazilian rainforest—an area about the size of California—over the last…

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Most of the world’s vaccines likely won’t prevent infection from Omicron

Most of the world’s vaccines likely won’t prevent infection from Omicron

The New York Times reports: A growing body of preliminary research suggests the Covid vaccines used in most of the world offer almost no defense against becoming infected by the highly contagious Omicron variant. All vaccines still seem to provide a significant degree of protection against serious illness from Omicron, which is the most crucial goal. But only the Pfizer and Moderna shots, when reinforced by a booster, appear to have initial success at stopping infections, and these vaccines are…

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Don’t panic about Omicron. But don’t be indifferent, either

Don’t panic about Omicron. But don’t be indifferent, either

Ashish K. Jha writes: The Omicron wave is upon us, and the national conversation is vacillating between panic and indifference. Those who are near panic point to rapidly rising case counts and lockdowns in several European nations. Those who are indifferent lean into reports of Omicron being a milder coronavirus variant; after nearly two years of COVID, that can feel like reason enough to put the pandemic in the rear-view mirror and get on with their life. Both perspectives are…

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Did Manchin just kill Biden’s domestic agenda? Or is he back to negotiating yet again?

Did Manchin just kill Biden’s domestic agenda? Or is he back to negotiating yet again?

Jonathan Chait writes: When historians record the Biden presidency, the aspect they will struggle to capture is just how much of it was spent attempting to divine the objectives and motivation of Joe Manchin. The West Virginia senator once again threw Washington into chaos by appearing on Fox News Sunday to deliver what may or may not be a death blow to the centerpiece of Biden’s domestic agenda. “I can’t move forward. I cannot vote to continue with this piece…

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The fallen mercenaries in Russia’s dark army

The fallen mercenaries in Russia’s dark army

New Lines reports: “If you’d have come here to tell me that my son is still alive, you would have made me the happiest mom in the world.” Svetlana Antipova opens the gate to allow us into her yard in the village of Shyryajeve. It is a pitch-black Saturday evening, a little over an hour’s drive outside Odessa, Ukraine. The stillness is interrupted only by dogs barking in the neighbors’ yards, altered to the arrival of strangers. Evgeny Antipov, Svetlana’s…

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