Supreme Court observers see trouble ahead as public approval of justices erodes

Supreme Court observers see trouble ahead as public approval of justices erodes

The Washington Post reports: The Supreme Court’s approval rating is plummeting, its critics are more caustic and justices are feeling compelled to plead the case to the public that they are judicial philosophers, not politicians in robes. All of this as the court embarks Oct. 4 on one of the most potentially divisive terms in years. Cases already docketed concern gun control, the separation of church and state, and the biggest showdown in decades on the future of Roe v….

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She bought her dream home. Then a ‘sovereign citizen’ changed the locks

She bought her dream home. Then a ‘sovereign citizen’ changed the locks

The New York Times reports: The official-looking letters started arriving soon after Shanetta Little bought the cute Tudor house on Ivy Street in Newark. Bearing a golden seal, in aureate legalistic language, the documents claimed that an obscure 18th-century treaty gave the sender rights to claim her new house as his own. She dismissed the letters as a hoax. And so it was with surprise that Ms. Little found herself in her yard on Ivy Street on a June afternoon…

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Cargo piles up as California ports jostle over how to resolve delays

Cargo piles up as California ports jostle over how to resolve delays

The Wall Street Journal reports: Nike Inc. doesn’t have enough sneakers to sell for the holidays. Costco Wholesale Corp. is reimposing limits on paper towel purchases. Prices for artificial Christmas trees have jumped 25% this season. Despite mounting shipping delays and cargo backlogs, the busiest U.S. port complex shuts its gates for hours on most days and remains closed on Sundays. Meanwhile, major ports in Asia and Europe have operated round-the-clock for years. “With the current work schedule you have…

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Afghanistan’s Taliban warn foot soldiers to behave themselves, and stop taking selfies

Afghanistan’s Taliban warn foot soldiers to behave themselves, and stop taking selfies

The Wall Street Journal reports: Rank-and-file Taliban fighters have been having too much fun in Kabul after seizing the Afghan capital without a fight last month, and the Taliban leadership has now issued a stern order to stop. Thousands of young Taliban men from all over the country, many of whom have never been to a big city before, were deployed in Kabul after the Afghan republic collapsed Aug. 15. When not on duty, they sightsee, picnic and visit amusement…

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Charles Sanders Peirce was America’s greatest thinker

Charles Sanders Peirce was America’s greatest thinker

Daniel Everett writes: The roll of scientists born in the 19th century is as impressive as any century in history. Names such as Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, George Washington Carver, Alfred North Whitehead, Louis Agassiz, Benjamin Peirce, Leo Szilard, Edwin Hubble, Katharine Blodgett, Thomas Edison, Gerty Cori, Maria Mitchell, Annie Jump Cannon and Norbert Wiener created a legacy of knowledge and scientific method that fuels our modern lives. Which of these, though, was ‘the best’? Remarkably, in the brilliant light…

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‘Stop the Steal’ movement races forward, ignoring Arizona humiliation

‘Stop the Steal’ movement races forward, ignoring Arizona humiliation

The New York Times reports: After all the scurrying, searching, sifting, speculating, hand-counting and bamboo-hunting had ended, Republicans’ post-mortem review of election results in Arizona’s largest county wound up only adding to President Biden’s margin of victory there. But for those who have tried to undermine confidence in American elections and restrict voting, the actual findings of the Maricopa County review that were released on Friday did not appear to matter in the slightest. Former President Donald J. Trump and…

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Maybe we should be talking more about the Trump coup memo

Maybe we should be talking more about the Trump coup memo

Tim Murphy writes: There was big news this week on what is known ominously and euphemistically as “the democracy beat,” and like all such news, it was bad. On Tuesday, CNN published a two-page memo written by a lawyer for then-President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign during the run-up to the January 6 certification of the Electoral College results. In six concise bullet-points, the memo outlined a process by which Vice President Mike Pence could use his powers on January 6…

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The lab-leak debate just got even messier

The lab-leak debate just got even messier

Daniel Engber and Adam Federman write: As the pandemic drags on into a bleak and indeterminate future, so does the question of its origins. The consensus view from 2020, that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally, through a jump from bats to humans (maybe with another animal between), persists unchanged. But suspicions that the outbreak started from a laboratory accident remain, shall we say, endemic. For months now, a steady drip of revelations has sustained an atmosphere of profound unease. The latest piece…

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The roots of Democratic disarray

The roots of Democratic disarray

Jeff Greenfield writes: If anyone tells you they know how the battle among congressional Democrats will be resolved, wish them a good day and walk away very quickly. They managed to pass an infrastructure bill in the Senate — with Republican support! — and are now in total disagreement on whether to vote on it in the House, not to mention what to put in a massive social spending bill, and whether one can pass without the other. There’s a…

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Biden should end America’s longest war: The War on Drugs

Biden should end America’s longest war: The War on Drugs

John Hudak writes: The War on Drugs, not the war in Afghanistan, is America’s longest war. It has used trillions of American taxpayer dollars, militarized American law enforcement agencies (federal, state, and local), claimed an untold number of lives, railroaded people’s futures (especially among Black, Latino, and Native populations), and concentrated the effort in the country’s most diverse and poorest neighborhoods. The War on Drugs has been a staggering policy failure, advancing few of the claims that presidents, members of…

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China is financing infrastructure projects around the world – many could harm nature and Indigenous communities

China is financing infrastructure projects around the world – many could harm nature and Indigenous communities

Chinese engineers pose after welding the first seamless rails for the China-Laos railway in Vientiane, Laos, June 18, 2020. Kaikeo Saiyasane/Xinhua via Getty Images By Blake Alexander Simmons, Boston University; Kevin P. Gallagher, Boston University, and Rebecca Ray, Boston University China is shaping the future of economic development through its Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious multi-billion-dollar international push to better connect itself to the rest of the world through trade and infrastructure. Through this venture, China is providing over…

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23,000-year-old footprints suggest people reached the Americas early

23,000-year-old footprints suggest people reached the Americas early

Ars Technica reports: Footprints left behind in layers of clay and silt at New Mexico’s White Sands National Park may be between 23,000 and 21,000 years old. That’s based on radiocarbon dating of the remains of grass seeds buried in the layers of sediment above and below the tracks. If the dates are correct, the tracks are evidence that people walked beside the now-dry Lake Otero during the height of the last ice age, when kilometers of ice covered the…

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Trump’s plans for a coup are now public

Trump’s plans for a coup are now public

Adam Serwer writes: Last year, John Eastman, whom CNN describes as an attorney working with Donald Trump’s legal team, wrote a preposterous memo outlining how then–Vice President Mike Pence could overturn the 2020 election by fiat or, failing that, throw the election to the House of Representatives, where Republicans could install Trump in office despite his loss to Joe Biden. The document, which was first reported by the Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their new book,…

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Tucker Carlson blows up Murdoch’s white supremacy denial on air

Tucker Carlson blows up Murdoch’s white supremacy denial on air

Jonathan Chait writes: Last spring, Fox News host Tucker Carlson used one of his inflammatory monologues to accuse the Biden administration of “​​trying to replace the current electorate” with “more obedient voters from the Third World.” Carlson has spent years edging up to the border of explicit white-supremacist rhetoric, but here he crossed over by echoing the precise theories of neo-Nazis, using their preferred terms. An alarmed Anti-Defamation League wrote to Carlson’s employers demanding they sack him. Lachlan Murdoch wrote…

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