International News
Saudi crown prince’s WhatsApp linked to Bezos phone hack
AP News
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The cellphone of Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos was hacked in what appeared to be an attempt by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince to “influence, if not silence” the newspaper’s reporting on the kingdom, two U.N. human rights experts said Wednesday.
Coronavirus: Wuhan to shut public transport over outbreak
BBC World News
Wuhan, a Chinese city of eleven million people, is to temporarily shut public transport as it tries to halt the outbreak of a new strain of virus.
Those living in the city have been advised not to leave, in a week when millions of Chinese are travelling for the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday.
The respiratory illness has spread to other parts of China, with some cases in other countries including the US.
American Dirt: why critics are calling Oprah's book club pick exploitative and divisive
The Guardian
American Dirt, the third novel by Jeanine Cummins, begins with a group of assassins opening fire on a quinceañera cookout. We watch Lydia’s entire family get killed, one by one. Only Lydia and her eight-year-old survive.
The scene is one of many depictions of graphic violence in American Dirt and it has sparked an intense conversation about “pity porn” and writing about the Mexican immigrant experience.
US News
Out cold: unseasonal temperatures litter south Florida with stunned iguanas
The Guardian
It truly was the night (and day) of the iguana.
After the National Weather Service (NWS) sent an unusual alert to south Florida residents on Tuesday night warning them of possible “falling iguanas” in light of unseasonably low temperatures, residents were indeed treated to a show of rigid reptiles out of the sky (or, actually, the trees).
The not-so-small creatures were seen motionless in the middle of sidewalks and backyards. While they looked dead, they were simply too cold to move.
Chief Justice Roberts could be an unexpected savior of public education in a religious schools case
Vox News
Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue is a case about two provisions of the First Amendment that are in tension with each other: The Free Exercise Clause limits the government’s ability to deny some benefits to people of faith. The Establishment Clause restricts the government’s ability to advance religion.
The Court, as it acknowledged in a decision written nearly a half a century ago, has “struggled to find a neutral course between the two Religion Clauses.” Both are “cast in absolute terms,” Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote in Walz v. Tax Commissioner (1970), and both of them, “if expanded to a logical extreme, would tend to clash with the other.”
On the Anniversary of Roe v. Wade, States Are Scrambling to Preserve It
Mother Jones
On this day in 1973, the Supreme Court issued a decision that enshrined the constitutional right to an abortion in the landmark case Roe v. Wade. But with mounting attacks on abortion rights and the most conservative Supreme Court in modern history, states across the country have spent the 47th year of Roe scrambling to protect a women’s right to choose in the increasingly plausible event that the historic court decision is soon overturned.
Science and Environmental News
More than half the world’s millennials fear a nuclear attack this decade
Vox News
A majority of millennials around the world believe it’s more likely than not that a nuclear attack will happen sometime in the next 10 years — a sign that younger adults’ views on global affairs is exceedingly bleak.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, a worldwide humanitarian organization, surveyed 16,000 millennials — adults between the ages of 20 and 35 — in 16 countries and territories last year: Afghanistan, Colombia, France, Indonesia, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Palestinian Territories, Russia, South Africa, Syria, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and the United States.