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There Is Only One Way for Biden to Fulfill His Promise to “Restore Roe”

If the president truly wants to protect reproductive rights, he’s going to have to do what he’s so far refused even to consider: expand the Supreme Court.

Click to view the original at thenation.com

Hasnain says:

“Look, I get that Trump is the easier target. He’s the perfect poster boy for the misogyny and filth that animate conservative rulings against reproductive rights. And I get that in our low-information, attention-deficient, celebrity-obsessed society, pretending that a president can single-handedly “restore Roe” is perhaps a necessary fiction. But abortion rights and access to lifesaving reproductive care will never again be allowed in the United States as long as conservative justices are allowed to control the Supreme Court.

And conservative justices will control the court, for the rest of my life and yours, as long as the Democrats refuse to commit to a platform of court expansion. There are simply no other options. The electoral binary is not “Biden” or “Trump”; it’s “expand the court” or “let pregnant people die.””

Posted on 2024-02-24T07:13:55+0000

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FTC bans antivirus giant Avast from selling its users' browsing data to advertisers | TechCrunch

Avast closed its Jumpshot subsidiary in 2020 after the antivirus giant was caught selling the browsing activity of millions of its customers.

Click to view the original at techcrunch.com

Hasnain says:

“The FTC said Avast collected customers’ online browsing habits for years, including their web searches and which websites they visited, using Avast’s own browser extensions, which the antivirus giant claimed would “shield your privacy” by blocking online tracking cookies.

But the FTC alleged that Avast sold consumers’ browsing data through its now-shuttered subsidiary, Jumpshot, to more than a hundred other companies, making Avast tens of millions of dollars in revenue.”

Posted on 2024-02-23T06:48:15+0000

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Reddit files to list IPO on NYSE under the ticker RDDT

Reddit's debut will mark the first major tech initial public offering of the year and the first social media IPO since Pinterest went public in 2019.

Click to view the original at cnbc.com

Hasnain says:

Kinda crazy to own so much to be called out here alongside big company investors

“Reddit has raised about $1.3 billion in funding and has a post valuation of $10 billion, according to deal-tracking service PitchBook. Publishing giant Condé Nast bought Reddit in 2006. Reddit spun out of Conde Nast’s parent company, Advance Magazine Publishers, in 2011.

Advance now owns 34% of voting power. Other notable shareholders include Tencent and Sam Altman, CEO of startup OpenAI.”

Posted on 2024-02-23T02:33:01+0000

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Hasnain says:

“These questions and issues don’t just matter in the current moment (though this is when they matter the most), but also for the legacy of Canadian journalism — for how the public here and abroad, scholars, legal figures, government officials, and future journalists look back at what the Canadian media did during what there is a chance may be ruled a genocide.

History is not going to look fondly on Canadian media. The mass slaughter should have prompted change far before it was ruled that it may plausibly be genocide. But with the ruling, there’s even less of an excuse. Unfortunately, it seems too many journalists are content to wait around for what may be a years-long ICJ trial to conclude. And when that happens, and Israel is perhaps found guilty of genocide, they will have acted like they were always against it and did what they could. “

Posted on 2024-02-21T17:31:34+0000

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Hasnain says:

“The president’s admirers like to refer to him as the “comforter-in-chief”. His aides call him a “devout Catholic”. He himself has talked, movingly and at length, about grief, loss and pain. So how does that same Biden sleep at night, as US-made bombs continue to fall on innocents in Gaza? How does he justify his inaction and complicity? Here is a man who has experienced devastating personal tragedies, losing his 29-year-old wife and one-year-old daughter in a car crash and then, decades later, losing a son to brain cancer. Yet he now possesses the power, unique among the 8 billion people who live on this planet, to pick up the phone, dial a number beginning +972, and halt the daily killing of hundreds of wives and children.

It really is that simple.

So Mr President, there’s no point “venting” your frustration in private and telling only your aides that the war “has to stop”.

Tell that to Netanyahu. Make the call. End this genocide.”

Posted on 2024-02-21T15:41:52+0000

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Hasnain says:

I feel like this would have been called super unrealistic if someone wrote this as fiction.

“Johnson, husband No. 4, says anyone who gets involved with his ex-wife is in for an emotional roller coaster ride.

"One day she hates you and one day she loves you and the next day she hates you," Johnson told the AP. "I guess I am lucky to be alive."

After 13 borrowed years, it appears Graham no longer felt that way.”

Posted on 2024-02-21T01:36:27+0000

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What Will It Take for the EPA to Ban a Pesticide Linked to Parkinson’s?

Over 60 years since Silent Spring, the Environmental Protection Agency still can’t seem to bring itself to curtail products like Roundup or paraquat.

Click to view the original at newrepublic.com

Hasnain says:

What are we even doing at this point?

“The Environmental Protection Agency recently reapproved paraquat, a toxic herbicide, even though a group of environmental and public health groups have been suing the agency for ignoring multiple studies showing paraquat exposure increases a person’s odds of developing Parkinson’s disease. That’s in addition to paraquat’s short-term effects, which can include heart failure, kidney failure, liver failure, and lung scarring if even a small amount of it is ingested, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In fact, the CDC fact sheet on paraquat includes the striking recommendation that if you get any on your clothes you should cut the affected garment off your body—because it is too dangerous to pull it over your head and risk ingesting paraquat—and see a doctor immediately. The company that sells paraquat, according to documents leaked to The Guardian in 2022, has known about possible long-term neurological effects since 1975 and deliberately downplayed them.”

Posted on 2024-02-20T05:25:03+0000

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Hasnain says:

“In the next few years, stories about children being mailed through rural routes would crop up from time to time as people pushed the limits of what could be sent through Parcel Post. In one famous case, on February 19, 1914, a four-year-old girl named Charlotte May Pierstorff was “mailed” via train from her home in Grangeville, Idaho to her grandparents’ house about 73 miles away, Nancy Pope writes for the National Postal Museum. Her story has become so legendary that it was even made into a children’s book, Mailing May.

“Postage was cheaper than a train ticket,” Lynch says.”

Posted on 2024-02-20T04:32:54+0000

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Hasnain says:

“Some experts, including Stephen Meier, chair of the management division at Columbia Business School in New York, remain genuinely baffled why companies like UPS are putting up a fight over return-to-office. But he believes there's a common thread among many of these firms: hard-line management tactics.

"You can't continue that leadership style that you had before [the pandemic]," he says. "You need to actually empower [employees] … And, I think, some leaders are just used to a certain command-and-control model."

This is true of many outspoken critics of remote work, such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk”

Posted on 2024-02-20T03:38:22+0000

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Hasnain says:

"Forty years into investigations of salt taste, researchers are still left with questions about how people’s tongues perceive salt and how the brain sorts those sensations into “just right” versus “too much” amounts. At stake is more than just satisfying a scientific curiosity: Given the cardiovascular risks that a high-salt diet poses to some of us, it’s important to understand the process.

Researchers even dream of developing better salt alternatives or enhancers that would create the “yum” without the health risks. But it’s clear they have more work to do before they invent something we can sprinkle on our dinner plates with abandon, free of health worries. "

Posted on 2024-02-19T05:33:07+0000