A $7 trillion climate change warning to the stock market from its biggest shareholder

A $7 trillion climate change warning to the stock market from its biggest shareholder

CNBC reports: The evidence of climate change — from global temperature records to Arctic ice melt, wildfires, hurricanes and flooding — is accelerating. So is investment pressure on corporations. In the past week, Exxon Mobil was targeted by activist investors, as well as CalSTRS, one of the nation’s largest pension funds. New York State’s $226 billion pension fund announced a plan to potentially divest from oil and gas stocks in the years ahead. The world’s largest money manager, BlackRock, issued…

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Hang on for three more months before holding family gatherings

Hang on for three more months before holding family gatherings

Zeynep Tufekci writes: Hunkering down to wait out the coronavirus isn’t easy. The costs of isolation are steep. Quarantine fatigue is real. The chance to gather with extended family and friends this holiday season is particularly alluring to those of us battling loneliness. Ritual is the bedrock of human society, and forsaking it feels even more destabilizing in a year that has already thrown us all off-kilter. Even so, I have a simple suggestion for anyone contemplating a large gathering…

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Being kind to others is good for your health

Being kind to others is good for your health

Marta Zaraska writes: Newspapers started writing about Betty Lowe when she was 96 years old. Despite being long past retirement age, she was still volunteering at a cafe at Salford Royal Hospital in Greater Manchester, UK, serving coffee, washing dishes and chatting to patients. Then Lowe turned 100. “Still volunteers at hospital”, the headlines ran. Then she reached 102 and the headlines declared: “Still volunteering”. The same again when she turned 104. Even at 106, Lowe would work at the…

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Biden picks former EPA chief Gina McCarthy as White House climate czar

Biden picks former EPA chief Gina McCarthy as White House climate czar

The Washington Post reports: President-elect Joe Biden has tapped Gina McCarthy, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama and now leads a major advocacy group, to coordinate the new administration’s domestic climate agenda from a senior perch at the White House. Three individuals familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the decision had not been publicly announced, confirmed that the final decision had been made to tap McCarthy for the post. McCarthy is…

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25% of global population may not get a Covid-19 vaccine until 2022, experts warn

25% of global population may not get a Covid-19 vaccine until 2022, experts warn

STAT reports: As wealthy governments race to lock in supplies of Covid-19 vaccines, nearly a quarter of the world’s population — mostly in low and middle-income countries — will not have access to a shot until 2022, according to a new analysis. As of mid-November, high income countries, including the European Union bloc, reserved 51% of nearly 7.5 billion doses of different Covid-19 vaccines, although these countries comprise just 14% of the world’s population. Meanwhile, only six of the 13…

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Trump’s Georgia fundraising scam antagonizes Republicans

Trump’s Georgia fundraising scam antagonizes Republicans

Politico reports: President Donald Trump couldn’t make it any clearer: He needs his supporters to fork over cash for the all-important Georgia Senate runoff elections. “We MUST defend Georgia from the Dems!” he wrote in one recent text message. “I need YOU to secure a WIN in Georgia,” he said in another. “Help us WIN both Senate races in Georgia & STOP Socialist Dems,” he pleaded a few days later. There’s just one hitch: Trump’s new political machine is pocketing…

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McConnell warns Senate Republicans against challenging election results

McConnell warns Senate Republicans against challenging election results

Politico reports: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned Republican senators Tuesday during a private caucus call not to object to the election results on Jan. 6, according to two sources familiar with the matter. McConnell told his caucus that challenging the results would force Republicans to take a “terrible vote” because they would need to vote it down and appear against President Donald Trump. Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) also echoed McConnell’s remarks. Sen….

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Inside the right-wing media bubble, where the myth of a Trump win lives on

Inside the right-wing media bubble, where the myth of a Trump win lives on

The New York Times reports: President Trump’s media criticism is usually binary — there are “good stories,” favorable to him, and then the other category. Most news coverage on Monday fell into that other category. One by one, presidential electors in all 50 states and the District of Columbia formally recognized Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the president-elect, the latest and most significant rejection so far of Mr. Trump’s desperate attempts to undo the will of the voters. But inside…

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Facebook is destroying humanity

Facebook is destroying humanity

Adrienne LaFrance writes: The Doomsday Machine was never supposed to exist. It was meant to be a thought experiment that went like this: Imagine a device built with the sole purpose of destroying all human life. Now suppose that machine is buried deep underground, but connected to a computer, which is in turn hooked up to sensors in cities and towns across the United States. The sensors are designed to sniff out signs of the impending apocalypse—not to prevent the…

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Hackers at center of sprawling spy campaign turned SolarWinds’ dominance against it

Hackers at center of sprawling spy campaign turned SolarWinds’ dominance against it

Reuters reports: On an earnings call two months ago, SolarWinds Chief Executive Kevin Thompson touted how far the company had gone during his 11 years at the helm. There was not a database or an IT deployment model out there to which his Austin, Texas-based company did not provide some level of monitoring or management, he told analysts on the Oct. 27 call. “We don’t think anyone else in the market is really even close in terms of the breadth…

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How science beat the coronavirus — and what it lost in the process

How science beat the coronavirus — and what it lost in the process

Ed Yong writes: In Fall of 2019, exactly zero scientists were studying COVID‑19, because no one knew the disease existed. The coronavirus that causes it, SARS‑CoV‑2, had only recently jumped into humans and had been neither identified nor named. But by the end of March 2020, it had spread to more than 170 countries, sickened more than 750,000 people, and triggered the biggest pivot in the history of modern science. Thousands of researchers dropped whatever intellectual puzzles had previously consumed…

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How climate change is ushering in a new era of pandemics

How climate change is ushering in a new era of pandemics

Jeff Goodell writes: Jennifer Jones spent most of her summer at home, as so many of us did, trying to avoid the plague. Jones, 45, lives in Tavernier, a community in the Florida Keys just south of Key Largo, and passed a lot of time in her yard, puttering around with plants. At some point, a mosquito landed on her. That’s not unusual in Florida, and Jones doesn’t remember this mosquito bite in particular. But it was not a garden-variety…

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How the ‘deep state’ scientists vilified by Trump helped him deliver an unprecedented achievement

How the ‘deep state’ scientists vilified by Trump helped him deliver an unprecedented achievement

The Washington Post reports: The timing of the hastily arranged White House “vaccine summit” last Tuesday bewildered many invitees. It was days before the authorization of the first coronavirus vaccine developed by Pfizer and German firm BioNTech — and nearly a week before millions of vaccine doses would be loaded onto trucks bound for every state in the nation. Wouldn’t those milestones and the mass vaccination effort that followed be what the White House would want to spotlight? That was…

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Trump tells allies he will run in 2024, but hints he may back out

Trump tells allies he will run in 2024, but hints he may back out

Politico reports: Donald Trump doesn’t need to run for president again. He just needs everyone to think he is. The president’s recent discussions with those around him reveal that he sees his White House comeback deliberations as a way to earn the commodity he needs most after leaving office: attention. The president has spent days calling a dozen or more allies to ask what they think he needs to do over the next two years to “stay part of the…

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