Australian PM Defends His Response to Deadly Fires
Atlantic Current Could Falter Before 2100 ; Why Cheese Is as Addictive as Cocaine ; and More Picks
Explosive Report Indicates That Donald Trump’s Loans From Deutsche Bank Were Backed by Russia (Chris)
From the Daily Kos: “According to Forensic News, Trump’s loans from Deutsche Bank were underwritten by a Russian state-owned bank. That news reportedly comes from a whistleblower with access to documents from both Deutsche Bank and Russia’s state-owned VTB Bank. VTB Bank was also the proposed lender on the never-completed Trump Tower Moscow project.”
Atlantic Current Could Falter Before 2100 (Chris)
The author writes, “There is roughly a one in six chance in the next century that the flow of the north Atlantic current may temporarily halt or falter because of climate change. That is because faster melting of the Greenland ice cap, and more freshwater in the Arctic Ocean, could trigger a slowdown in what scientists like to call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.”
Rudy Giuliani Mixed White House Role, Personal Business in Cybersecurity (Reader Steve)
The author writes, “Giuliani’s blurring of White House and personal business didn’t start with Ukraine. It began in the early days of the Trump administration, when Giuliani was named as a White House adviser in an area where he had limited experience but was trying to build a clientele: cybersecurity. His unpaid position with the new administration was vague, because Trump never gave him an official title or created a formal advisory committee for him to serve on or to chair. If Trump had done so, federal ethics laws would have obliged Giuliani to reveal any financial connections that might enable him to profit from his position.”
Counties That Hosted a 2016 Trump Rally Saw a 226% Increase in Hate Crimes (Reader Jim)
The author writes, “Using the Anti-Defamation League’s Hate, Extremism, Anti-Semitism, Terrorism map data (HEAT map), we examined whether there was a correlation between the counties that hosted one of Trump’s 275 presidential campaign rallies in 2016 and increased incidents of hate crimes in subsequent months. To test this, we aggregated hate-crime incident data and Trump rally data to the county level and then used statistical tools to estimate a rally’s impact. We included controls for factors such as the county’s crime rates, its number of active hate groups, its minority populations, its percentage with college educations, its location in the country and the month when the rallies occurred.”
Why Cheese Is as Addictive as Cocaine (Mili)
From the National Post: “There might be a scientific reason why it’s so hard to bri(e)ng yourself to put the cheese down.”
