UN Warns of ‘Narrowing Window’ To Restore Forests

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UN Warns of ‘Narrowing Window’ To Restore Forests (Maria)

The author writes, “The world faces a ‘narrowing window’ to restore forests essential for food security and resistance to the climate emergency, a United Nations report has warned. More than 489M hectares (1.2B acres) of forests have been cleared since 1990, while an even greater area is degraded, the world body said in a call for governments to make forest restoration a national priority.” 

I Started Fact-Checking Trump 10 Years Ago. Here Are 15 Things I’ve Learned (DonkeyHotey)

The author writes, “Ten years ago this month, in my old job as Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, I started what I believed would be a quick little side project: fact-checking underdog presidential candidate Donald Trump, who was telling a remarkable number of lies but was rarely being corrected. Like a lot of people, I thought Trump would lose the 2016 election. I was very wrong. And Trump continued to be very wrong, about a dizzying variety of subjects, for the next decade.”

We Need to Talk About the Apocalypse (Bethany)

From The New Republic: “End-times prophecy, pro-war prayer circles, Democrats as demons: Christian dominionism’s influence is everywhere in the second Trump administration — and increasingly, within America itself. Can democracy survive the assault?” 

The Pentagon’s Million Drone March (Sean)

The author writes, “The Pentagon, if we let them, will buy a million drones over the next few years. You read that right. One million. This spending spree is premised on the Pentagon’s frankly dumbass belief that the next war will look like the one Ukraine is fighting (a trench-warfare style slog), rather than the kind the U.S. has spent decades and billions preparing to fight with airpower and long-range precision weapons.”

US Datacenters Face Further Backlash Over Wastewater Pollution (Laura)

The author writes, “From rare bacteria to ‘forever chemicals,’ a series of cases of violations or alleged pollution has prompted alarm.” 

The Mystery of ‘Medbeds’ (Dana)

From Slate: “The video that sent me spiraling looks like a Fox News report. There’s President Donald Trump in a screen within a screen, sitting at the Resolute Desk. He smiles broadly as he signs an executive order. Then, b-roll, panning above a vast two-wing building identifiable as a hospital by its helipad. Next, an interior shot, sweeping across a gleaming white room occupied by sleek screens and glass-domed beds, space-age Sleeping Beauty contraptions. ‘Breaking now,’ Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, says from what appears to be a Fox News studio, ‘President Donald J. Trump has announced a historic new healthcare system: the launch of America’s first medbed hospitals and a national medbed card for every citizen.’ … The president of the United States had promoted one of the cruelest conspiracy theories on the internet: the dark fantasy of medbeds.”

Austrian Yodelers Take Their Voices Underground, Turning a Parking Garage Into the Alps (Reader Steve)

The author writes, “No mountains to practice on? No problem. Yodeling fans in Austria have moved their practice sessions to an underground parking garage, since it produces echoes like those they can get in the landscapes of the Alps. ‘It’s not too dissimilar to the high mountains,’ said yodeling teacher Anna Maria Gutschi as she led a group of 30 through an empty parking garage earlier this week. ‘You have wide hallways; you have walls that reflect a lot.’ Gutschi works for the Styrian Volksliedwerk, a cultural organization promoting traditional folk music in the southeastern Austrian city of Graz — which is not in the high mountains, but sits in a flat basin surrounded by hills and low mountain ranges at the edge of the Alps.”