Defeated and impeached, Trump still commands the loyalty of the GOP’s voters

Defeated and impeached, Trump still commands the loyalty of the GOP’s voters

USA Today reports: If there’s a civil war in the Republican Party, the voters who backed Donald Trump in November’s election are ready to choose sides. Behind Trump. An exclusive Suffolk University/USA TODAY Poll finds Trump’s support largely unshaken after his second impeachment trial in the Senate, this time on a charge of inciting an insurrection in the deadly assault on the Capitol Jan. 6. By double digits, 46%-27%, those surveyed say they would abandon the GOP and join the…

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Oath Keeper claims she was VIP security at Trump rally before riot and says she met with Secret Service agents

Oath Keeper claims she was VIP security at Trump rally before riot and says she met with Secret Service agents

CNN reports: A leader in an alleged Oath Keepers conspiracy in the US Capitol insurrection claims she was given a VIP pass to the pro-Trump rally on January 6, had met with Secret Service agents and was providing security for legislators and others, including in their march to the Capitol, according to a new court filing. Attorneys for Ohio Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins detail how the efforts among paramilitants who are now accused of conspiracy on January 6 were closer…

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Statehood for Washington, D.C., is a matter of justice

Statehood for Washington, D.C., is a matter of justice

Anne Applebaum writes: The city has changed dramatically even in my lifetime. When I was growing up in D.C. in the 1970s and ’80s, it still felt like a small town. It didn’t have much traffic. It had no outer suburbs. It had few restaurants outside of Duke Zeibert’s or the Palm, owned by New Yorkers, where congressmen went to eat shrimp cocktail. The fashionable went to New York to buy dresses, if they wanted something special; everyone else went…

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Texas crisis exposes a nation’s vulnerability to climate change

Texas crisis exposes a nation’s vulnerability to climate change

The New York Times reports: Even as Texas struggled to restore electricity and water over the past week, signs of the risks posed by increasingly extreme weather to America’s aging infrastructure were cropping up across the country. The week’s continent-spanning winter storms triggered blackouts in Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and several other states. One-third of oil production in the nation was halted. Drinking-water systems in Ohio were knocked offline. Road networks nationwide were paralyzed and vaccination efforts in 20 states were…

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Trump gears up for war with his own party

Trump gears up for war with his own party

Politico reports: There’s no longer a chief of staff to screen his calls and he keeps no predictable working hours. So an unspoken rule has governed Donald Trump’s calendar since he left Washington last month: To sit down with the former president, you must belong to his posh Palm Beach club or know how to contact him directly. But even that won’t always do it. For weeks now, Trump has rejected meetings with everyone from former South Carolina governor and…

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Feds now say right-wing extremists responsible for majority of deadly terrorist attacks last year

Feds now say right-wing extremists responsible for majority of deadly terrorist attacks last year

Jana Winter reports: The U.S. government is acknowledging for the first time that right-wing extremists were responsible for the majority of fatal domestic terrorist attacks last year, according to an internal report circulated by the Department of Homeland Security last week and obtained by Yahoo News. A review of last year’s domestic terrorist incidents by a DHS fusion center — which shares threat-related information between federal, state and local partners — found that although civil unrest and antigovernment violence were…

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Jews fear what follows after Republicans applauded Marjorie Taylor Greene

Jews fear what follows after Republicans applauded Marjorie Taylor Greene

Deborah Lipstadt writes: Having spent decades studying, teaching, researching and fighting antisemitism, [Georgia Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor] Greene’s claims were familiar territory. All of them – space lasers, 9/11, school shootings, Trump’s election loss and so much else – shared a common theme: conspiracy. In her QAnon-inspired worldview, behind them all was a small group of inordinately powerful people who had global – not national – loyalties. They conspired against the common welfare to advance their own interests. They mutilated…

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Merrick Garland faces resurgent peril after years fighting extremism

Merrick Garland faces resurgent peril after years fighting extremism

The New York Times reports: Judge Merrick B. Garland always made a point of wearing a coat and tie when he surveyed the wreckage at the site of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the worst domestic terrorist attack in American history. He had been dispatched from Washington to oversee the case for the Justice Department, and he told colleagues that he viewed his daily uniform as a gesture of respect for a community left devastated after Timothy J. McVeigh placed…

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Electric cars’ looming recycling problem

Electric cars’ looming recycling problem

By Perry Gottesfeld, Undark In September, Tesla announced that it would be phasing out the use of cobalt in its batteries, in an effort to produce a $25,000 electric vehicle within three years. If successful, this bold move will be an industry game changer, making electric vehicles competitive with conventional counterparts. But the announcement also underscores one of the fundamental challenges that will complicate the transition to electric vehicles. Without cobalt, there may be little financial incentive to recycle the…

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Economic growth has become a malignancy

Economic growth has become a malignancy

Here is Dr. Mike Ryan speaking at a @trocaire event yesterday about the catastrophe we're walking into. I genuinely think this is the most important clip you'll ever see. pic.twitter.com/eKxBWEu7SM — Eoghan Rice (@rice_e) February 18, 2021 Mike Ryan, World Health Organization

Martin Luther rewired your brain

Martin Luther rewired your brain

Joseph Henrich writes: Your brain has been altered, neurologically re-wired as you acquired a particular skill. This renovation has left you with a specialized area in your left ventral occipital temporal region, shifted facial recognition into your right hemisphere, reduced your inclination toward holistic visual processing, increased your verbal memory, and thickened your corpus callosum, which is the information highway that connects the left and right hemispheres of your brain. What accounts for these neurological and psychological changes? You are…

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Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is highly effective after one dose and can be stored in normal freezers, data shows

Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is highly effective after one dose and can be stored in normal freezers, data shows

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE generates robust immunity after one dose and can be stored in ordinary freezers instead of at ultracold temperatures, according to new research and data released by the companies. The findings provide strong arguments in favor of delaying the second dose of the two-shot vaccine, as the U.K. has done. They could also have substantial implications on vaccine policy and distribution around the world, simplifying the…

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More Oath Keeper suspects charged in Capitol riot plot

More Oath Keeper suspects charged in Capitol riot plot

The New York Times reports: The Justice Department lodged charges on Friday against six more suspected members of the Oath Keepers, adding new defendants to a case that had already accused others in the right-wing militia group of an organized plot to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6 and stop the final certification of the presidential election. The charges, filed in Federal District Court in Washington, accused Kelly Meggs, the self-described leader of the Oath Keepers’ Florida chapter, and his…

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Erik Prince, Trump ally, violated Libya arms embargo, UN report says

Erik Prince, Trump ally, violated Libya arms embargo, UN report says

The New York Times reports: Erik Prince, the former head of the security contractor Blackwater Worldwide and a prominent supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, violated a United Nations arms embargo on Libya by sending weapons to a militia commander who was attempting to overthrow the internationally backed government, according to U.N. investigators. A confidential U.N. report obtained by The New York Times and delivered by investigators to the Security Council on Thursday reveals how Mr. Prince deployed a…

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