U.S. added to list of ‘backsliding’ democracies for first time

U.S. added to list of ‘backsliding’ democracies for first time

The Guardian reports: The US has been added to an annual list of “backsliding” democracies for the first time, the International IDEA thinktank has said, pointing to a “visible deterioration” it said began in 2019. Globally, more than one in four people live in a backsliding democracy, a proportion that rises to more than two in three with the addition of authoritarian or “hybrid” regimes, according to the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. “This year we coded…

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Al Gore ‘was a man’ about his election loss, unlike Trump, federal judge says

Al Gore ‘was a man’ about his election loss, unlike Trump, federal judge says

CNN reports: A federal judge took aim at former President Donald Trump on Monday for lying about voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election, saying that former Vice President Al Gore had a better standing to challenge the 2000 election results but that he was “a man” and walked away. “Al Gore had a better case to argue than Mr. Trump, but he was a man about what happened to him,” Senior District Judge Reggie Walton said of Gore’s decision…

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The QAnon JFK cult in Dallas is tearing families apart

The QAnon JFK cult in Dallas is tearing families apart

Vice News reports: Katy Garner and her sister grew up in a small town in Arkansas and were always close. “We both were cheerleaders in school, made pretty good grades, and loved to just hang out with friends and each other. No one has a perfect childhood, but we had each other. We knew that. And that’s what made us so close. We even have matching tattoos to remind each other of that,” Garner told VICE News. They both became…

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U.S. considering sending extra weaponry to Ukraine as fears mount over potential Russian invasion

U.S. considering sending extra weaponry to Ukraine as fears mount over potential Russian invasion

CNN reports: The Biden administration is weighing sending military advisers and new equipment including weaponry to Ukraine as Russia builds up forces near the border and US officials prepare allies for the possibility of another Russian invasion, multiple sources familiar with the deliberations tell CNN. The discussions about the proposed lethal aid package are happening as Ukraine has begun to warn publicly that an invasion could happen as soon as January. The package could include new Javelin anti-tank and anti-armor…

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A ‘universal’ flu vaccine could bring one of the world’s longest pandemics to an end

A ‘universal’ flu vaccine could bring one of the world’s longest pandemics to an end

Matthew Hutson writes: In 2009, global health officials started tracking a new kind of flu. It appeared first in Mexico, in March, and quickly infected thousands. Influenza tends to kill the very young and the very old, but this flu was different. It seemed to be severely affecting otherwise healthy young adults. American epidemiologists soon learned of cases in California, Texas, and Kansas. By the end of April, the virus had reached a high school in Queens, where a few…

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Canada’s tar sands: Destruction so vast and deep it challenges the existence of land and people

Canada’s tar sands: Destruction so vast and deep it challenges the existence of land and people

Inside Climate News reports: The first mine opened when Jean L’Hommecourt was a young girl, an open pit where an oil company had begun digging in the sandy soil for a black, viscous form of crude called bitumen. She and her family would pass the mine in their boat when they traveled up the Athabasca River, and the fumes from its processing plant would sting their eyes and burn their throats, despite the wet cloths their mother would drape over…

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Junk food is bad for plants, too

Junk food is bad for plants, too

Anne Biklé and David R. Montgomery write: Most of us are familiar with the much-maligned Western diet and its mainstay of processed food products found in the middle aisles of the grocery store. Some of us beeline for the salty chips and others for the sugar-packed cereals. But we are not the only ones eating junk food. An awful lot of crops grown in the developed world eat a botanical version of this diet—main courses of conventional fertilizers with pesticide…

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Climate denial is waning on the right. What’s replacing it might be just as scary

Climate denial is waning on the right. What’s replacing it might be just as scary

The Guardian reports: Standing in front of the partial ruins of Rome’s Colosseum, Boris Johnson explained that a motive to tackle the climate crisis could be found in the fall of the Roman empire. Then, as now, he argued, the collapse of civilization hinged on the weakness of its borders. “When the Roman empire fell, it was largely as a result of uncontrolled immigration – the empire could no longer control its borders, people came in from the east and…

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How the U.S. lost ground to China in the contest for clean energy

How the U.S. lost ground to China in the contest for clean energy

The New York Times reports: Tom Perriello saw it coming but could do nothing to stop it. André Kapanga too. Despite urgent emails, phone calls and personal pleas, they watched helplessly as a company backed by the Chinese government took ownership from the Americans of one of the world’s largest cobalt mines. It was 2016, and a deal had been struck by the Arizona-based mining giant Freeport-McMoRan to sell the site, located in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which now…

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GOP donors back Manchin and Sinema as they reshape Biden’s agenda

GOP donors back Manchin and Sinema as they reshape Biden’s agenda

The New York Times reports: Over the summer, as he was working to scale back President Biden’s domestic agenda, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia traveled to an $18 million mansion in Dallas for a fund-raiser that attracted Republican and corporate donors who have cheered on his efforts. In September, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who along with Mr. Manchin has been a major impediment to the White House’s efforts to pass its package of social and climate policy,…

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The complicated truth about Trump 2024

The complicated truth about Trump 2024

Peter Nicholas writes: If Donald Trump tries to run for president again, one of his former campaign advisers has a plan to dissuade him. Anticipating that Trump may not know who Adlai Stevenson was or that he lost two straight presidential elections in the 1950s, this ex-adviser figures he or someone else might need to explain the man’s unhappy fate. They’ll remind Trump that if he were beaten in 2024, he would join Stevenson as one of history’s serial losers….

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As gerrymanders get worse, legal options to overturn them dwindle

As gerrymanders get worse, legal options to overturn them dwindle

The New York Times reports: Voting-rights advocates are in a North Carolina state court in Raleigh this month, arguing in three lawsuits that Republican gerrymanders of the State Legislature and the state’s 14 seats in the House of Representatives are so extreme that they violate the state Constitution. Only two years ago, some of the same lawyers were arguing that remarkably similar Republican gerrymanders of the same legislature, drawn a decade ago, violated the same clauses of the constitution. That…

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on why Democrats’ ‘talking points are not enough’

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on why Democrats’ ‘talking points are not enough’

The New York Times reports: Last year, after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the Democratic presidential nomination, a group of progressive lawmakers rallied around him to project party unity at a critical time. More than a year later, as the president seeks to pass a robust spending package of social policies that represent the bulk of his domestic agenda, many of the same leaders are looking for a return on their political investment. In an interview with The New York…

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How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

MIT Technology Review reports: In 2015, six of the 10 websites in Myanmar getting the most engagement on Facebook were from legitimate media, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-run tool. A year later, Facebook (which recently rebranded to Meta) offered global access to Instant Articles, a program publishers could use to monetize their content. One year after that rollout, legitimate publishers accounted for only two of the top 10 publishers on Facebook in Myanmar. By 2018, they accounted for…

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How the Western diet has derailed our evolution

How the Western diet has derailed our evolution

Moises Velesquez-Manoff writes: For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment—the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research, inspiring him to study how diet and native microbes shape our risk for disease—came from a village in the African hinterlands. A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers, who subsisted on a diet of mostly millet and sorghum, harbored far more microbial diversity…

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