Events

The UK has started a £100 m repatriation scheme to get stranded Thomas Cook customers home: The government has said it will run a "shadow airline" for two weeks to repatriate the 155,000 UK tourists affected by the firm's collapse. Transport secretary Grant Shapps said its response to the crisis was "on track so far" and "running smoothly". Mr Shapps, who earlier attended an emergency Cobra government meeting on the government's response, said: "People will experience delays, we're not running the...

The arrival in New York this week of climate activist Greta Thunberg has thrown the Right into their version of pearl-clutching hyperventilation. Unfortunately for civil discourse, their version involves death threats and impotent rage. So why has Thunberg's quest for a reduction in climate-changing pollution make so many people so irrational? Possibly they're hyper-masculine climate deniers, with more than a soupçon of misogyny: In 2014, Jonas Anshelm and Martin Hultman of Chalmers published a paper...

In an unprecedented decision, the UK Supreme Court ruled today that PM Boris Johnson misled the Queen when asking her to prorogue Parliament, rendering the prorogation unlawful and void: The unanimous judgment from 11 justices on the UK’s highest court followed an emergency three-day hearing last week that exposed fundamental legal differences over interpreting the country’s unwritten constitution. “It is for parliament, and in particular the Speaker and the Lord Speaker, to decide what to do next....

Thomas Cook, founded in 1841, collapsed yesterday, stranding 150,000 people and causing the largest repatriation effort in British history: The Civil Aviation Authority announced at 2am on Monday morning that the world’s oldest holiday company had gone into administration and that all flights and bookings had been cancelled. The official administration was timed for the early hours when the largest number of the 94-strong fleet of planes were on the ground. The tour operator is understood to have made a...

James Fallows calls out the press for, once again, treating two different scandals as the same: Under normal circumstances, the press’s strong preference is for procedural balance. The program’s supporters say this, its critics say that, so we’ll quote both sides of it to you, the public, to decide who is right. This approach has the obvious virtue of seeming fair, as a judge is fair in letting the prosecution and defense each make its case. It has a less obvious but very important advantage for news...

Via Bruce Schneier, Irish writer Maria Farrell explains how a feminist perspective leads to some creepy realizations about smart phones: Here are some of the ways our unequal relationship with our smartphones is like an abusive relationship: They isolate us from deeper, competing relationships in favour of superficial contact – ‘user engagement’ – that keeps their hold on us strong. Working with social media, they insidiously curate our social lives, manipulating us emotionally with dark patterns to...

Yesterday, a photograph of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in brownface makeup prompted a quick apology and an excellent reply from New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh. Today, the New York Times reported that Trudeau appears in three—count 'em, three—photos showing him racially-insensitive outfits: A Liberal Party spokesman confirmed that the young man in blackface in the video published Thursday morning by Global News was Trudeau, and said it was “from the early 1990s." Trudeau turned 20...

A new paper in Science today reports that North America has lost 27% of its bird population since 1970, with the biggest declines in grasslands and forests. The authors of the report, ornithologists John Fitzpatrick and Peter Marra, sound the alarm: As ornithologists and the directors of two major research institutes that directed this study, even we were shocked by the results. We knew of well-documented losses among shorebirds and songbirds. But the magnitude of losses among 300 bird species was much...

This morning I pointed to William Langewische's essay the New York Times Magazine published this morning about the 737-MAX airplane crashes last year. Lagnewische has flown airplanes professionally and covers aviation as part of his regular beat. He has written, among other things, analyses of the Egypt Air Flight 990 suicide-murder in 1999; an entire book about the USAirways 1549 Hudson River ditching in 2009; and numerous other articles and essays of varying lengths about aviation. His father...

Just a few today: Cokie Roberts died yesterday at 75. She will be missed. The Washington Post traced all 47 dogs seized from convicted felon Michael Vick's dog-fighting operation. You will not get through this without tissues. Greenland struggles with its history and identity as much of it melts. Despite his coalition losing seats and the state of Israel essentially repudiating him, Benjamin Netanyahu could still hold onto his job. Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot has come up with an innovative use of...