Capitol Police didn’t act on warnings Trump backers would breach Capitol, target Democrats, report says

Capitol Police didn’t act on warnings Trump backers would breach Capitol, target Democrats, report says

NBC News reports: U.S. Capitol Police leaders learned that Trump supporters were discussing ways to infiltrate tunnels around the complex and target Democratic members of Congress on Jan. 6 but failed to act on the threats, according to a new Senate report summing up what it says were profound intelligence and security failures that contributed to one of the worst incidents of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. The report also says that officers complained about a lack of leadership within…

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Carbon dioxide levels hit 50% higher than preindustrial time

Carbon dioxide levels hit 50% higher than preindustrial time

The Associated Press reports: The annual peak of global heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air has reached another dangerous milestone: 50% higher than when the industrial age began. And the average rate of increase is faster than ever, scientists reported Monday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the average carbon dioxide level for May was 419.13 parts per million. That’s 1.82 parts per million higher than May 2020 and 50% higher than the stable pre-industrial levels of 280 parts…

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Accelerationist thinking is proliferating in ways that could destabilize democracy

Accelerationist thinking is proliferating in ways that could destabilize democracy

The New York Times reports: For QAnon it is “The Storm,” when mass violence will topple the elite cabal of pedophiles who they imagine to be running the government. White-power groups in the United States have long promised a catastrophic race war. And in Germany and Austria, neo-Nazis herald an imagined putsch on “Day X” — when the democratic order collapses and they take over. All are examples of “accelerationist” ideologies, which promise a moment when the institutions of government,…

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Manchin’s incoherent case for letting Republicans destroy democracy

Manchin’s incoherent case for letting Republicans destroy democracy

Jonathan Chait writes: What does Joe Manchin want? The inscrutable whims of the West Virginia senator and 50th Senate vote have always controlled the future of the Biden administration’s domestic agenda. As such, Manchin’s desires are the subject of daily speculation and the vessel into which his party has projected a mix of hope and rage. It would be a relief of sorts if Manchin would simply tell us what he wants. The problem is that his statements frequently conflict…

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In Arizona 2020 election review, risks for Republicans, and democracy

In Arizona 2020 election review, risks for Republicans, and democracy

The New York Times reports: Rob Goins is 57, a former Marine and a lifelong Republican in a right-leaning jigsaw of golf courses, strip malls and gated retirement communities pieced together in the Arizona desert. But ask about the Republican-backed review of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 election victory here in Maricopa County, and Mr. Goins rejects the party line. “There’s a lot of folks out there trying to make something out of nothing,” he said recently as he loaded…

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The value of the Hubble Constant and the fate of the universe

The value of the Hubble Constant and the fate of the universe

Corey S Powell writes: What determines our fate? To the Stoic Greek philosophers, fate is the external product of divine will, ‘the thread of your destiny’. To transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau, it is an inward matter of self-determination, of ‘what a man thinks of himself’. To modern cosmologists, fate is something else entirely: a sweeping, impersonal physical process that can be boiled down into a single, momentous number known as the Hubble Constant. The Hubble Constant can be…

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Pesticides are killing the world’s soils

Pesticides are killing the world’s soils

Nathan Donley and Tari Gunstone write: Scoop up a shovelful of healthy soil, and you’ll likely be holding more living organisms than there are people on the planet Earth. Like citizens of an underground city that never sleeps, tens of thousands of subterranean species of invertebrates, nematodes, bacteria and fungi are constantly filtering our water, recycling nutrients and helping to regulate the earth’s temperature. But beneath fields covered in tightly knit rows of corn, soybeans, wheat and other monoculture crops,…

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How an American nightmare becomes real

How an American nightmare becomes real

Timothy Snyder writes: I have the Cassandra feeling this spring because it is so obvious where all of this is heading. President Trump tells a big lie that elections are rigged. This authorizes him and others to seek power in extra-democratic ways. The lie is institutionalized by state legislation that suppresses voting, and that gives state legislatures themselves the right to decide how to allocate the electoral vote in presidential elections. The scenario then goes like this. The Republicans win…

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The Republicans wild assault on voting rights in Texas and Arizona

The Republicans wild assault on voting rights in Texas and Arizona

Sue Halpern writes: A few hours after Michael Flynn, the retired three-star general and former national-security adviser and convicted felon, told a group of QAnon conspiracists who met in Dallas over Memorial Day weekend that the Biden Administration should be overthrown by force, Democratic legislators in the Texas statehouse, two hundred miles away in Austin, did something remarkable: they stopped their Republican colleagues from passing one of the most restrictive voting bills in the country. Flynn’s pronouncement and the Republicans’…

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Once a bastion of free speech, the ACLU faces an identity crisis

Once a bastion of free speech, the ACLU faces an identity crisis

The New York Times reports: It was supposed to be the celebration of a grand career, as the American Civil Liberties Union presented a prestigious award to the longtime lawyer David Goldberger. He had argued one of its most famous cases, defending the free speech rights of Nazis in the 1970s to march in Skokie, Ill., home to many Holocaust survivors. Mr. Goldberger, now 79, adored the A.C.L.U. But at his celebratory luncheon in 2017, he listened to one speaker…

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Don’t expect Netanyahu’s departure to alter the course of politics in Israel

Don’t expect Netanyahu’s departure to alter the course of politics in Israel

Daniella Peled writes: It would be encouraging to think that the massive upheaval afoot in Israeli politics with the unseating of Benjamin Netanyahu also signals a seismic shift in political culture. Perhaps a turning point in its democratic decline, even a move towards ending its rule over millions of Palestinians. Unfortunately, it signals none of these things. The burning desire to depose Israel’s longest serving leader is certainly the driving force behind the disparate eight-party coalition that hopes to replace…

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Israel’s internal security service warns of Jan. 6-style mob violence ahead of Netanyahu’s exit

Israel’s internal security service warns of Jan. 6-style mob violence ahead of Netanyahu’s exit

The Washington Post reports: The head of Israel’s internal security service said that “extremely violent and inciting discourse” targeting the lawmakers who are seeking to end Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year tenure as prime minister could take a potentially lethal form — a grim echo of the warnings ahead of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Shin Bet chief Nadav Argeman said Saturday that the spike in vitriol targeting Netanyahu’s opponents online and in public demonstrations “may be interpreted by…

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Is a revolution brewing in evolutionary theory?

Is a revolution brewing in evolutionary theory?

Kevin Laland writes: When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks), they found, to their consternation, that both the children and grandchildren of these mice were spontaneously afraid of the same smell. That is not supposed to happen. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is impossible. A mouse should not be born with something its parents have learned during their lifetimes,…

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