A climate dystopia in Northern California

A climate dystopia in Northern California

Naomi Klein writes: It’s a ritual that has been repeated many times over the coldest months of Northern California’s winter. The Chico police arrive between 9 a.m. and noon on a Thursday, perhaps in the hopes of catching people when they are home. Home, in this case, being flimsy tents, draped in tarps, many of them strung up between pine trees, secured to fences, or hidden beneath highway overpasses. The cops read out orders and sometimes hand out flyers: You…

Read More Read More

The age of misinformation in which ‘belonging is stronger than facts’

The age of misinformation in which ‘belonging is stronger than facts’

Max Fisher writes: There’s a decent chance you’ve had at least one of these rumors, all false, relayed to you as fact recently: that President Biden plans to force Americans to eat less meat; that Virginia is eliminating advanced math in schools to advance racial equality; and that border officials are mass-purchasing copies of Vice President Kamala Harris’s book to hand out to refugee children. All were amplified by partisan actors. But you’re just as likely, if not more so,…

Read More Read More

How America became the money laundering capital of the world

How America became the money laundering capital of the world

Peter Stone writes: In March, federal agents raided the Beverly Hills premises of a company called U.S. Private Vaults. According to a subsequent grand jury indictment, U.S. Private Vaults was a money laundering operation where drug dealers and others could anonymously stash fentanyl, guns, and “huge stacks of $100 bills” in safe deposit boxes. U.S. Private Vaults didn’t really bother to hide its business, boasting in ads, “We don’t even want to know your name.” It also shared its strip…

Read More Read More

Washington has enabled Israeli extremism

Washington has enabled Israeli extremism

Khaled Elgindy writes: Two weeks ago, Jerusalem was rocked by violence as bands of Jewish Israeli extremists rampaged through Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem chanting “death to Arabs.” Making their way through the city, mobs hurled rocks at Palestinian homes and assaulted passersby suspected of being Arabs or leftists, even stopping cars along the main north-south road that divides Israeli West Jerusalem from occupied East Jerusalem to check whether drivers were Jews or Arabs, usually subjecting the latter to an…

Read More Read More

U.S. support for Covid vaccine patent waivers puts pressure on EU and UK

U.S. support for Covid vaccine patent waivers puts pressure on EU and UK

Sarah Boseley writes: It was a “seismic decision” by Joe Biden, the US president, say campaigners who have fought for the demolition of patent protection on vaccines and drugs for decades. The US administration has amazed supporters and critics alike by throwing its considerable weight behind the pleas of South Africa, India and about 100 developing countries at the World Trade Organization to overturn patents on Covid vaccines in the interests of getting more of them, more cheaply and faster,…

Read More Read More

Biden is betting that boldness is better than moderation

Biden is betting that boldness is better than moderation

Ronald Brownstein writes: Some of the changes are obvious: Compared with the economic strategies of former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Joe Biden is proposing more new spending and more new taxes than either of his Democratic predecessors, and he’s abandoned their support for negotiating new free-trade agreements. But Biden is also diverging from his predecessors’ approaches in ways that have drawn much less attention—yet may prove even more consequential. Particularly on racial-, gender-, and class-inequality issues, Biden’s separation…

Read More Read More

‘Turning the corner’: U.S. Covid outlook reaches most hopeful point yet

‘Turning the corner’: U.S. Covid outlook reaches most hopeful point yet

The New York Times reports: After weeks of coronavirus patients flooding emergency rooms in Michigan, the worst Covid-19 hot spot in the nation, hospitalizations are finally falling. On some recent days, entire states, including Wisconsin and West Virginia, have reported zero new coronavirus deaths — a brief but promising respite from the onslaught of the past year. And in New York and Chicago, officials encouraged by the recent progress have confidently vowed to fully reopen in the coming weeks, conjuring…

Read More Read More

China’s greenhouse gas emissions now exceed all the developed world’s combined

China’s greenhouse gas emissions now exceed all the developed world’s combined

Bloomberg reports: China now accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than all of the world’s developed nations combined, according to new research from Rhodium Group. China’s emissions of six heat-trapping gases, including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, rose to 14.09 billion tons of CO2 equivalent in 2019, edging out the total of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development members by about 30 million tons, according to the New York-based climate research group. The massive scale of China’s emissions highlights…

Read More Read More

The census shows the U.S. needs to increase immigration — by a lot

The census shows the U.S. needs to increase immigration — by a lot

Vox reports: The results of the 2020 census are a warning sign that America is on a course for slow population growth. Economists broadly agree that population growth fuels economic growth in wealthy countries. But the recently released census figures show the US population grew by just 7.4 percent, or 331.5 million people, between 2010 and 2020 — the lowest rate since the 1930s. Projections suggest that, unless current trends change, those numbers could continue to diminish dramatically over the…

Read More Read More

Liz Cheney is fighting a monster she helped create

Liz Cheney is fighting a monster she helped create

Adam Serwer writes: Liz Cheney, the representative of Wyoming, the daughter of a former vice president, and a lifelong conservative Republican, is facing a purge. Cheney’s transgression? She has continued to insist, truthfully, that former President Donald Trump’s claims about the 2020 election are false, after having voted to impeach him in March for inciting a mob that stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the result. Yesterday, Steve Scalise, the No. 2 Republican in the House, publicly advocated…

Read More Read More

Can single-cell organisms learn?

Can single-cell organisms learn?

Catherine Offord writes: Even by her own telling, Beatrice Gelber’s work was offbeat. It was October 1960, and Gelber had recently opened a facility called the Basic Health Research Institute in Tucson, Arizona. Described as an “enthusiastic psychologist” by the newspaper interviewing her about her work, Gelber explained how, several years earlier, she’d discovered an unexpected behavior in a protozoan called Paramecium aurelia. This unicellular organism, she claimed, had shown it was capable of learning, a feat generally assumed to…

Read More Read More

U.S. seen as bigger threat to democracy than Russia or China, global poll finds

U.S. seen as bigger threat to democracy than Russia or China, global poll finds

The Guardian reports: The US faces an uphill task presenting itself as the chief guardian of global democracy, according to a new poll that shows the US is seen around the world as more of a threat to democracy than even Russia and China. The poll finds support for democracy remains high even though citizens in democratic countries rate their governments’ handling of the Covid crisis less well than people in less democratic countries. Inequality is seen as the biggest…

Read More Read More

Oversight Board: ‘Facebook seeks to avoid its responsibilities’

Oversight Board: ‘Facebook seeks to avoid its responsibilities’

Will Oremus writes: [T]he problems with Mr. Trump’s presence on Facebook — the lies, the propaganda, the incitements — are not just Trump problems. They’re Facebook problems (and to be fair, Twitter problems). Manipulation, misinformation, fear and loathing are endemic to today’s social media platforms, whose engagement-driven algorithms are built to spread whatever messages tap into users’ viscera and provoke a quick “like” or an angry comment. Yet the platforms have delegated much of the work of moderating this content…

Read More Read More

The problem is Facebook

The problem is Facebook

Helen Lewis writes: Back to you, Zuck. Facebook’s oversight board earlier today declined to act as a human shield for the social network. Asked to rule on the suspension of Donald Trump’s account in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot, it passed the ultimate decision back to Facebook. For now, Trump’s suspension stays in place. But the board has given Facebook six months to “reexamine the arbitrary penalty it imposed on January 7 and decide the appropriate penalty.”…

Read More Read More