   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
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S1The Global Chip Battle, in Charts  Governments have stepped up efforts to bolster their domestic productions of the chips that power everything from cars to electronics to artificial intelligence, and companies worldwide are competing to be part of the frenzy. Global semiconductor revenue is expected to top $1 trillion by the end of the decade, according to forecasts by the chip-industry consulting firm International Business Strategies.Stronger domestic production could diversify the highly specialized semiconductor supply chain, which in certain regions has strengths in some areas of the process and weaknesses in others. U.S. companies are leaders in many areas of chip design, for example, while those in Taiwan, South Korea and mainland China dominate the later production and assembly stages.
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S3iPhone 16 Pro will break a world record with this new feature, according to new reports However, I'd suggest you have your grain of salt ready. Last August, shortly before the reveal of the iPhone 15, 9to5Mac claimed that the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max models will sport "1.5mm bezels". The outlet even leaned on Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, a respected Apple analyst and leaker, to corroborate the rumor. However, this leak turned out to be false. As such, we won't know for sure if these rumors are true until the Cupertino-based tech giant reveals the next-generation iPhones later this year. However, this scuttlebutt does appear to meet Apple's ultra-thin plans for its products. After all, the recently unveiled iPad Pro is Apple's thinnest product ever.
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S6Scientists should use AI as a tool, not an oracle Who produces AI hype? As we discuss in the AI Snake Oil book, it is not just companies and the media but also AI researchers. For example, a pair of widely-publicized papers in Nature in December 2023 claimed to have discovered over 2.2 million new materials using AI, and robotically synthesized 41 of them. Unfortunately, the claims were quickly debunked: “Most of the [41] materials produced were misidentified, and the rest were already known”. As for the large dataset, examining a sample of 250 compounds showed that it was mostly junk.A core selling point of machine learning is discovery without understanding, which is why errors are particularly common in machine-learning-based science. Three years ago, we compiled evidence revealing that an error called leakage — the machine learning version of teaching to the test — was pervasive, affecting hundreds of papers from 17 disciplines. Since then, we have been trying to understand the problem better and devise solutions.
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S7S8S9 Leading With Compassion When a Teammate Has a Terminal Illness The spring 2024 issue’s special report looks at how to take advantage of market opportunities in the digital space, and provides advice on building culture and friendships at work; maximizing the benefits of LLMs, corporate venture capital initiatives, and innovation contests; and scaling automation and digital health platform.The spring 2024 issue’s special report looks at how to take advantage of market opportunities in the digital space, and provides advice on building culture and friendships at work; maximizing the benefits of LLMs, corporate venture capital initiatives, and innovation contests; and scaling automation and digital health platform.When an employee is diagnosed with a terminal illness, the complexities of workplace management deepen significantly. It’s not merely about handling the practicalities of business continuity or addressing the aftermath of a loss; it’s also about navigating the prolonged, emotionally charged period that precedes it. Some employees may choose to continue working through a terminal illness to maintain a sense of normalcy, purpose, or financial stability, which can be crucial for their psychological well-being during such a challenging time. This journey, marked by uncertainty and emotional upheaval, demands a compassionate, thoughtful approach from managers.
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S10'Venom 3' Trailer Reveals a Head-Scratching MCU Crossover After over 15 years of movies and TV shows, it seems like every actor has had the chance to appear in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe. That may not literally be true, but it’s hard not to believe it when Marvel alums pop up again and again in different corners of the franchise. This trend of repeat casting was once pretty rare, a necessary evil that’s given great actors like Gemma Chan (who had a minor role in Captain Marvel before starring in Eternals) another chance to show off their stuff. More recently, though, actors have been using the multiverse to make increasingly meta cameos, creating some interesting (if unofficial) crossovers in the process.That might be the case for Venom: The Last Dance, the third (and maybe final) film in Sony’s Venom trilogy. Sony’s made an odd effort to build out its own Marvel Universe, one populated solely by Spider-Man villains. And while it’s occasionally brushed up against the MCU with a head-scratching Morbius cameo and some multiversal hijinks in Spider-Man: No Way Home, The Last Dance may bring these two parallel timelines closer together than ever.
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S11This New Handheld PC Has Specs That Could Crush All Other Handheld PCs Asus’ new ROG Ally X is here and it may have all the specs to beat the other handheld gaming PCs — at least on paper.Asus officially revealed its latest gaming handheld, which should be considered more of a follow-up or a refresh rather than a next-gen model of its ROG Ally. That’s because the ROG Ally X largely follows the same design, but makes room for a few ergonomic tweaks and internal upgrades.
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S12The Best New Platformer On PC Comes From a Horror Developer Banned in China Soulslike games have become so numerous that even fans of the genre might be feeling a bit burned out on the grueling challenge they present by now. I know I have. But while From Software’s Dark Souls and Bloodborne have been imitated and referenced to the point of exhaustion, the studio’s shinobi masterpiece Sekiro hasn’t gotten the same treatment. But a new Sekiro-inspired Metroidvania from a surprising developer shows that more games may want to start looking at Sekiro’s nerve-wracking parry mechanics for inspiration.Last week, Red Candle Games released Nine Sols, set in what the studio calls a Taopunk setting, which “blends cyberpunk elements with Taoism and Far Eastern mythology.” Taiwanese developer Red Candle is best known for Detention and Devotion, two psychological horror games that use religion and China’s oppression of Taiwan as the basis for their stories. Devotion in particular got a lot of attention for an Easter egg unflatteringly representing Chinese president Xi Jinping, which got the game pulled from sale.
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S13'Helldivers 2' Just Spawned A Black Hole, and Players Already Have Wild Theories About It The valiant Helldivers 2 community spent the weekend snuffing out the supercolony of Terminids that overtook the remote planet of Meridia. The victory has been immortalized with the creation of a Black Hole in distant space, an anomaly that is most definitely a good thing for the continued fight for democracy. Yep. That’s not weird, and there’s absolutely no way this could backfire on Super Earth at all.The most recent major order in Helldivers 2, dubbed “Operation Enduring Peace,” tasked players with eradicating those pesky bugs from Meridia through some unusual means: the deployment of a brand new WMD (short for Weapon of Mass Democracy) called the Dark Fluid.
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S14Netflix's Wildest New Sci-Fi Show Avoids a Tired Genre Trope In 2023, Max dropped a haunting and original animated science fiction series called Scavengers Reign. Although the show was critically acclaimed, by May 2024, Max had abruptly canceled the series. But now, Scavengers Reign has made the leap to Netflix, where it’s currently streaming and might just get a Season 2 renewal if we’re lucky. Chronicling the machinations of a group of human survivors marooned on a planet called Vesta, this series is one of the best sci-fi shows of the 2020s, and easily the best space-based sci-fi show on Netflix since the Lost in Space reboot debuted in 2018. And although there is much to praise about Scavengers Reign, there’s one specific element that sets it apart from most modern sci-fi movies and shows set in space: This is a space show that doesn’t accidentally become military science fiction.
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S15AI Still Hasn't Lived Up To Its Extraordinary Hype Big Tech is telling us that AI is dramatically changing the world, but according to a recent study, most people have never even heard of it. Many of us grew up with the looming threat — or excitement, depending on how you were raised — of artificial intelligence. Once just the stuff of sci-fi, storytellers prophesized a dramatic future in which AI would rule over us all.
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S16This Dwarf Planet Is Basically a Sweet Red Snow Cone If there were a recipe for Kuiper Belt’s sweetest dwarf planet, it would look something like this: Take one 22-mile long, figure-8-shaped blob of mixed ice, and add a heaping pour of methanol. Bombard with cosmic rays and solar wind for about 2 billion years, until it reaches a nice reddish color. Serve chilled to -390 degrees Fahrenheit.A recent study found that Arrokoth, a weirdly-shaped dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, gets its distinctive reddish coloration from complex hydrocarbon molecules, which form when cosmic rays and solar wind bombard the tiny world’s frozen methanol surface. The same chemical reactions that spawn those hydrocarbons also produce sugars like glucose and glycerol, which means that if you licked Arrokoth, it would probably taste sweet, but also a little like soap. (Please don’t try this, because methanol is poison, and also you shouldn’t open your spacesuit helmet in a vacuum. Safety first!)
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S17Netflix Just Quietly Released the Best Sci-Fi Monster Movie of the Decade It’s been six months since Godzilla Minus One emerged — seemingly out of nowhere — to become one of the best films of 2023. Toho took a big risk in rebooting its 70-year-old franchise, and the monster that’s always been at the center of the action. Since the very first Godzilla in 1954, the eponymous kaiju has slowly but surely become a character to root for: a hilarious meme, an unlikely athlete, and even a protector of the innocent. But Minus One reminded us all why Godzilla was originally a tool of horror, and delivered a fantastically heartfelt disaster movie in the process.Minus One’s theatrical run was impressive, but ultimately brief. Though its glowing word-of-mouth helped extend the film’s time in theaters, and eventually bolstered its visibility during awards season, Minus One hasn’t gotten much exposure since. Even after securing the franchise’s first Academy Award in March, there was no word on when Minus One would be available on home video... at least in the United States. But after months of false starts and speculation, Godzilla Minus One is finally, officially available to stream.
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S18This 'Team Fortress 2' Spiritual Successor Is Being Made at the Worst Possible Time It may seem like a distant memory now, but Valve was once known for making games rather than just selling them on Steam. And not just any games, but great, genre-defining games. Its recent projects, like Counter-Strike 2 and the Steam Deck tech demo Aperture Desk Job haven’t quite lived up to that legacy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the once-great developer is down and out. Evidence is mounting that a new game from Valve could be on the way, and it’s an entry in a popular genre that the studio itself helped create. But whether that’s something to be excited or worried about is still unclear.Valve’s worst-kept secret is a game reportedly called Deadlock. Though the studio hasn’t acknowledged Deadlock’s existence in any way, leaks have allegedly revealed screenshots, in-game footage, and details on how the game will actually play. Last week, Valve leaker Gabe Follower also shared a trademark filing for Deadlock, seemingly confirming that the game is real. It’s always possible that the filing could add up to nothing. Developers — including Valve — frequently file trademarks for projects that never see the light of day. But what’s most interesting about this latest movement on Deadlock is that the game could represent either a rebirth for a struggling genre or a sign of the games industry’s decline.
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S19How Chevy's New Bolt Could Become the Cheapest EV in the U.S. The beloved Chevrolet Bolt is almost back from the brink of extinction. Even better, GM understands what made the Bolt so popular in the first place and is doubling down on the affordability aspect.In an interview with Automotive News, Marissa West, GM’s new North American president, said that a new Bolt will be “the most affordable vehicle on the market by 2025.” That’s a bold claim, but not an impossible one for Chevy. After all, the most affordable EV on the market right now starts at around $28,000 before any federal tax incentives. Chevy’s not the only automaker interested in making entry-level EVs, but here’s how it can make the most affordable model for next year.
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S2015 Years Ago, the Studio Behind 'Saints Row' Made the Most Chaotic Action Game Ever The Xbox 360 and PS3 era of video games was filled with countless titles chasing emerging trends, from the flood of games with massive open worlds to the increasing push for hyper-realistic graphics. Arguably the most fun of the half-dozen trends of the generation, though, were the games all about destruction, where you blow buildings, enemies, and everything in between into little bits. For a long time, Battlefield was the king of destruction mechanics, but in 2009, the Red Faction series exploded back onto the scene with one of the most maniacally fun games ever made, and nothing has topped it since. The first two Red Faction games were first-person shooters that took place on a terraformed Mars, chronicling the people’s fight to liberate themselves from the iron grip of the Ultor Corporation. When Guerilla released in 2009, it had been seven years since the last entry, and Volition brilliantly redefined the Red Faction franchise as a whole.
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S21'Baldur's Gate 3' Is The Latest RPG To Add This Highly Requested Feature Baldur’s Gate 3 is finally getting mod support in its next big update, a feature that all but guarantees the longevity of Larian Studio’s award-winning role-playing masterpiece.The seventh patch for Baldur’s Gate 3 is set to hit in September, Larian confirmed Sunday. It will introduce an officially sanctioned toolkit that lets fans “change up visuals, animations, sounds, stats, and more to overhaul Baldur’s Gate 3 into the weird nightmare realm of your dreams.”
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S22The Oculus Rift Creator Just Made a Bonkers Game Boy Recreation There may be a million gaming handhelds to choose from, but only one of them comes from the famed creator of the Oculus Rift.Palmer Luckey, the aforementioned progenitor of the Oculus Rift, just announced the Chromatic — the world’s only “pixel-accurate” Game Boy clone that actually plays (get this) old-school cartridges.
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S23China's Chang'e-6 Successfully Landed on the Moon's Elusive Dark Side -- On Saturday, the latest of the Chang’e lunar fleet landed on the side of the Moon we cannot see from Earth. The mission aims to collect about four and a half pounds of material, and then will ship the samples to Earth. This includes surface regolith, or Moon dirt, as well as excavated material buried as far down as six and half feet deep, obtained with its scoop and drill.Chang’e-6 is in a lucrative place. Known as the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin, it’s full of ejected lunar mantle material. The landscape is therefore rich in information about the history of the Moon and the Solar System, according to the non-profit organization The Planetary Society. Closer to the present day, the lunar south pole is where space agencies are keen to place their 21st century astronauts. That’s because frozen water might be trapped here.
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S24The Most Anticipated Star Wars Show Will Finally Show an Unseen Side of the Jedi Almost four years after it was first announced, The Acolyte is finally hitting Disney+, and the more that’s shared about this groundbreaking series, the more excited the fandom gets. It’s the furthest in the past live-action Star Wars has ever gone, giving us our first live-action look at the High Republic — an era a century before the prequels when the Jedi were at their peak. Now, it’s finally time to see just what’s going on with the mysterious assassin Mae and the golden-robed Jedi of the era, and Lucasfilm is giving this series the special release it deserves. Here’s everything you need to know about tuning into this series.
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S25Nintendo Switch Just Quietly Released the Most Exhilarating Star Wars Game of 2024 In Star Wars: Hunters, you can play as two Jawas in a trench coat, a precariously balanced sibling duo that slings scrap metal. It’s the kind of wacky, creative premise that should tell you all you need to know about the newest Star Wars video game — this time from gaming behemoth Take-Two (the parent company behind everything from Grand Theft Auto to NBA 2K). The new game, available now on Nintendo Switch and mobile (with cross-platform saves), combines the hero-shooter genre with the familiar locales of everyone’s favorite galaxy far, far away.“We have to make that something that is approachable to people, so that it’s not too unusual where they can’t pick up and play those things,” design director Scott Warner tells Inverse. Warner cites games like Overwatch and Apex Legends as influences on Star Wars: Hunter.
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S2618 Years Later, Zack Snyder's Most Influential Movie Is Making a Surprising Comeback Hollywood is always hunting for the next bankable franchise, and it’s got no qualms about going into the past to find it. The industry is already saturated with prequels, sequels, and spin-offs, but more are coming as studios and streamers circle back to franchises that seemed to end decades ago. As frustrating as this trend can be, it’s not all bad. While audiences aren’t exactly clamoring for another prequel series to a long-gone IP, one new spin-off could give an established director a refreshing change of pace.Per Variety, Zack Snyder is in talks with Warner Bros. to develop a prequel series to his 2007 epic 300, which would see Snyder return as director and executive producer. Exact plot details are still up in the air, but it’s safe to assume the series would follow the rise of Leonidas, King of Sparta (portrayed in 300 by Gerard Butler). In the film, Leonidas and his army launch a doomed battle against the Persian king Xerxes, and their bravery turns a tragedy into a formidable legend.
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S27This New Male Birth Control Worked Astonishingly Well In Mice. Will It Work In Humans? In recent years, a spate of potential male contraceptive options have cropped up. From a hormonal gel that lowers testosterone production to a non-hormonal pill that blocks the creation of vitamin A, new ways to safely — and reversibly — prevent impregnation have appeared as promising mechanisms behind the first potential male contraceptive. Now, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have identified another non-hormonal approach that could serve as the basis for male birth control. The new method involves inhibiting the protein serine/threonine kinase 33 (STK33), which men require for fertility. The team identified a molecule that inhibits STK33 temporarily in mice, preventing the creation of functional sperm as well as pregnancy. They published their findings last week in the journal Science.
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S28Hulu Just Quietly Added the Scariest Demonic Thriller of the Year With the prevailing rationale being that the horror genre gets way less scary the more you attempt to explain it, the work of a horror movie prequel is mostly devoted to justifying its own existence. The First Omen, which just hit Hulu, is not an outlier to this — it’s here to show you how we managed to get to the events of the classic 1976 film, The Omen. What makes it different is how effectively it turns what could be a rote set-up and unnecessary exposition into fantastic thriller material.The Omen, directed by the late Richard Donner, doesn’t seem to need much explaining. In fact, the whole film is devoted to solving the mystery of how the child of an American diplomat was replaced, and how that new child (Damien, soon to become a horror movie icon), turned out to be the Antichrist. This all makes The First Omen seem even more unnecessary on paper. In telling why a new Antichrist would need to be conceived and what set the wheels in motion for the rebirth of such an evil entity, it’s essentially a set-up to a set-up.
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S2915 Years Later, the Best Sims Game Still Hasn't Been Topped By the late 2000s, The Sims was ubiquitous, familiar to Simmers and non-gamers alike. The first Sims was a runaway hit that acted as a highly successful proof of concept. The Sims 2 tweaked that formula, expanding and improving upon it — even though it didn’t match the sales figures of the first.So when The Sims 3 launched in early June of 2009, hopes were high. Miraculously, the franchise entry not only lived up to expectations, it surpassed them. Instead of merely offering more incremental improvements, The Sims 3 (nearly) perfected the concept, establishing some of the franchise’s most popular tropes and setting a high bar that franchise developer Maxis is still trying to surpass 15 years later.
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S30S32S33S34Nearly 25% of land in Africa has been damaged - what's to blame, and what can be done Land degradation is a huge issue across the continent of Africa. One of its biggest drivers is biological invasions. This is when invasive species (species that aren’t naturally found in the area) arrive and produce large numbers of offspring which spread over long distances. Mlungele Nsikani, a land restoration specialist and environmental scientist, explains how ecological restoration is a great way to reverse land degradation.Africa is one of the most degraded continents in the world. About 23% of the surface of Africa, or over 700 million hectares of land, is already degraded. Another three million hectares is being further degraded annually.
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S35S36S37Do we have more empathy for people who are similar to us? New research suggests it's not that simple How do people successfully interact with those who are completely different from them? And can these differences create social barriers? Social scientists are struggling with these questions because the mental processes underlying social interactions are not well understood.The theory proposes that people who have very different identities and communication styles from each other – which is often the case for autistic and non-autistic people – can find it harder to empathise with one another. This two-way difficulty is what they mean by the double-empathy problem.
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S38S39Brutalist Plants: this pocket picture book is perfectly formed, but puts style over substance To take the frictionless, scrolling pixels from Instagram and reproduce them in the physical world as a tactile, tablet-sized, small object of desire, is a curious concept. But the recently published book, Brutalist Plants, does just that, as its contents are derived from author Olivia Broome’s Instagram account. Meta’s algorithms have previously delivered me other micro-niche topics such as @tiny.houses and @sexygutters, but I had not been aware of @brutalistplants before receiving this book. If you were, then you already know exactly what to expect – and you are probably the target audience. And you probably already know that this book is somehow about neither brutalist architecture, nor plants.
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S40Sepsis: why this deadly condition is so hard to diagnose Tory MP Craig Mackinlay recently returned to Commons for the first time after suffering from a life-threatening bout of sepsis last year. Since his return to public duties, Mackinlay has spoken candidly about his experience with the near-fatal illness that led to the amputation of his hands and feet. Last September, Mackinlay said he’d begun feeling unwell – but didn’t think anything of his symptoms, especially after testing negative for COVID.
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S41Studying violence toward women and animals can help us develop strategies to prevent both We live in a world where not everyone feels safe and respected, especially women. Sexual violence and abuse are significant global health issues. Intimate partner violence continues to be a problem in Canada. According to Statistics Canada, of the 117,093 victims of police-reported intimate partner violence in 2022, almost 80 per cent were women and girls. More than half of women in the United States have experienced sexual violence involving physical contact.
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S42South Africa election: ANC's lost majority ushers in a new era of coalition politics From the moment this year’s South African general election was called, through the whole campaign, the main question everyone here was asking was whether the African National Congress (ANC) could extend its 30-year rule. The party of Nelson Mandela, elected in 1994 on a wave of euphoria and hope, has had its difficult moments – notably during the Zuma years of corruption – but its hold on power had always seemed electorally assured. It had brought liberation and taken South Africa forward.
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S43S44Mexico elects first female president - but will that improve the lot of country's women? After an election period marred by violence, ruling Morena party candidate Claudia Sheinbaum, a former Mexico City mayor, emerged as the victor with about 60% of the vote – a larger share of the vote than her mentor and predecessor, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, won in 2018. Sheinbaum beat rival Xóchitl Gálvez, a senator for the center-right National Action Party, who trailed with less than 30% of the vote.Acknowledging the significance of the occasion, Sheinbaum said: “For the first time in the 200 years of the republic I will become the first woman president of Mexico.”
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S45'The first wave went through hell' - how the 16th Infantry Regiment's heroism helped bring victory on D-Day Among the many Allied military units storming the Normandy coast on June 6, 1944, was the 16th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division. Its members faced a particularly daunting task: As part of the first wave of the largest amphibious assault in history, the regiment was assigned to clear the Omaha Beach landing sectors code-named “Easy Red” and “Fox Green.” This was no ordinary assault. Omaha would become the most deadly of the five D-Day landing beaches, as the U.S., U.K. and allied nations attacked Nazi-occupied France in World War II. The liberation of Europe hung in the balance.
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S46Here's how climate social scientists are finding their way in the era of climate crisis In early May The Guardian reported on a survey that explored the thoughts and feelings of 380 climate scientists. It was not uplifting. The pull quotes tell a story of anguish. “Sometimes it is almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken…Running away from it is impossible.”The acceleration of the climate crisis has been breathtaking and talking to experts in a time of crisis is a good thing. But these articles are problematic. They seek to motivate through fear while usualy offering only vague notions of absent “political will” to diagnosis the problem and little beyond “listen to the scientists” as a solution.
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S47Taylor Swift is ready for her history to be rewritten Taylor Swift is famous for writing her life (and, most notoriously, her ex-boyfriends) into her music. But she is also fascinated by history, and regularly incorporates historic figures, places and events into her songs. An avid reader since early childhood, Swift has long drawn inspiration from women of the past (both real and fictional) who challenged social conventions and were punished for not conforming to traditional gender roles.
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S48S49'An intergenerational crime against humanity': what will it take for political leaders to start taking climate change seriously? It’s not hard to understand why. This year we had a plenary address by a distinguished IPCC veteran. The speaker began by saying that the world has “Buckley’s chance” of achieving the 1.5°C target, and even 2°C is going to be a stretch. If emissions continue at the current rate, the 1.5°C threshold could be breached as soon as 2028. Forget the critical decade, what happens every single month during the next handful of years is crucial in determining how quickly we drain the remaining carbon budget needed to achieve the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.
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