Reading archive 2023-10-23

How plants communicate with each other when in danger

Opinion  Listen to the Gazans who are seeking a path away from Hamas - "If you doubt there are Palestinians who oppose the terrorist regime that Hamas has created, visit a project called “Whispered in Gaza” online. You’ll hear 25 powerful narratives that were recorded over the past 18 months. The Gazans’ names are changed and their faces drawn by animators, but their message has the unmistakable power of truth."

How the CIA’s top-ranking woman beat the agency’s men at their own game

How did McDonald’s become a new flash point in the Israel-Gaza war?

Spy vs. spy: How Israelis tried to stop Russia’s information war in Africa: This never-before-told tale reveals how covert online battles in the French-speaking Sahel region helped topple governments. - "Three years later, the governments of five former French colonies, including Burkina Faso, have been toppled. The new leaders of two of those countries, Mali and Burkina Faso, are overtly pro-Russian; in a third, Niger, the prime minister installed after a July coup has met recently with the Russian ambassador. In Mali and the Central African Republic, French troops have been replaced with Wagner mercenaries."

Sidney Powell was Trump’s biggest ‘fighter.’ Now she’s a big threat.: Powell, who was angry that Trump didn’t act on her counsel, is the government’s most prominent asset in its quest to convict him

Opinion  Climate change is the catastrophe to end all other catastrophes - "Questions about whether actresses in the last Marvel movie made the same six figures as their male counterparts, or how many Fortune 500 CEOs are women, are irrelevant to the future well-being of most women on this planet. Even our boldest notions of how to improve the status of women — expanding access to education, health care, housing and liberty — will be meaningless if women are swept away in mega floods, buried in landslides or suffocated by wildfires."

RELENTLESS WRESTLER: Jim Jordan is an unyielding combatant, whether grappling on the mat or in the halls of Congress - "Just seven and a half months later their first son, the eventual Congressman James Daniel Jordan, was born on Feb. 17, 1964." [ed. note: shotgun wedding!]

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"She kept reporting, and in 2019 finally secured an interview with a wrestler named Dan Ritchie, who told a story that showed just what the wrestlers were up against in trying to contradict Jordan. Ritchie revealed that Strauss had molested him, but he had not told a soul until the story broke on that fateful Fourth of July, when he confided in his wife and tried to tell his parents. His wife was comforting. His parents were not. 'Because at the time Jim Jordan was in line for speaker of the House. And we are conservatives. We’re Republicans. My father is, you know, very political,' Ritchie said in Marshall’s report. 'And his concern was, 'How is this going to affect Jim Jordan?''"

Concerns about Jordan’s election denialism flare during failed bid for speaker