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            <h1 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Did Climate Change Intensify Hurricane Harvey? </h1>
            
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        <section id="article-section-1"><p>Every so often, the worst-case scenario comes to pass.</p><p>As of Sunday afternoon, the remnants of Hurricane Harvey seem likely to exceed the worst forecasts that preceded the storm. The entire Houston metropolitan region is flooding: Interstates are under feet of water, local authorities have asked boat owners to join rescue efforts, and most of the streams and rivers near the city are in flood stage.</p><p>Some models suggest that the storm will linger over the area until Wednesday night, dumping 50 inches of water in total on Houston and the surrounding area.</p><p>“Local rainfall amounts of 50 inches would exceed any previous Texas rainfall record. The breadth and intensity of this rainfall are beyond anything experienced before,” said a statement from the National Weather Service. “Catastrophic flooding is now underway and expected to continue for several days.” (In years of weather reporting, I have never seen a statement this blunt and ominous.)</p></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector1" targeting-pos="boxinjector1" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2" data-object-pk="1" data-object-name="boxinjector"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3], [320, 520], [320, 430], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-2"><p>This means that thousands of people—and perhaps tens of thousands of people—are facing a terrifying and all-too-real struggle to survive right now. In an age when the climate is changing rapidly, a natural question to ask is: What role did human-caused global warming play in strengthening this storm?</p><p>Climate scientists, who specialize in thinking about the Earth system as a whole, are often reticent to link any one weather event to global climate change. But they say that aspects of the case of Hurricane Harvey—and the recent history of tropical cyclones worldwide—suggest global warming is making a bad situation worse.</p><p>It may not be obvious why global warming has anything to do with hurricane strength. Climate change is caused by the release of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. These gases prevent some of the sun’s rays from bouncing back into space, trapping heat in the planetary system and raising air temperatures all over the world.</p><figure><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">As the world warms, evaporation speeds up. So on avg there's more water vapour for a storm to sweep up &amp; dump now, compared to 70 years ago. <a href="https://t.co/M4R9OFFZt9" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'0',r'538158'">https://t.co/M4R9OFFZt9</a></p>
— Katharine Hayhoe (@KHayhoe) <a href="https://twitter.com/KHayhoe/status/900810732635336705" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'1',r'538158'">August 24, 2017</a></blockquote>
</figure><p>This warmer air causes evaporation to happen faster, which can lead to more moisture in the atmosphere. But that phenomenon alone does not explain climate change’s effects on Harvey.</p><p>Storms like Harvey are helped by one of the consequences of climate change: As the air warms, some of that heat is absorbed by the ocean, which in turn raises the temperature of the sea’s upper layers.</p></section><div class="ad-boxright-wrapper" data-pos="boxright"><gpt-ad id="boxright1" targeting-pos="boxright1" class="ad ad-boxright" lazy-load="2" data-object-pk="3" data-object-name="boxright"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [300, 600]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-3"><p>Harvey benefited from unusually toasty waters in the Gulf of Mexico. As the storm roared toward Houston last week, sea-surface waters near Texas rose to <a href="http://www.climatesignals.org/node/7158" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'2',r'538158'">between 2.7 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit above average</a>. These waters were some of <a href="https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/900388963185295360" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'3',r'538158'">the hottest spots of ocean surface in the world</a>. The tropical storm, feeding off this unusual warmth, was able to progress from a tropical depression to a category-four hurricane in roughly 48 hours.</p><p>“This is the main fuel for the storm,” says Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Although these storms occur naturally, the storm is apt to be more intense, maybe a bit bigger, longer-lasting, and with much heavier rainfalls [because of that ocean heat].”</p><p>This also suggests an explanation for one of Harvey’s strangest and scariest behaviors. The storm intensified up until the moment of landfall, achieving category-four strength hours before it slammed into the Texas coast. This is not only rare for tropical cyclones in the western Gulf of Mexico: It may be unique. In the past 30 years of records, <a href="https://twitter.com/sezick/status/901181680102322176" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'4',r'538158'">no storms west of Florida have intensified in the last 12 hours before landfall</a>.</p><aside class="pullquote instapaper_ignore">Harvey is just the kind of weird weather that scientists expect to see more of as the planet warms.</aside><p>Why do storms normally weaken—and why didn’t Harvey? As mentioned above, hurricanes feed and grow on warm ocean surface waters. But as they grow, their strong winds often pick up seawater, churning the oceans and moving the warmest waters deep below the surface. The same winds also bring newer, colder water closer to the atmosphere, which usually serves to drain energy and weaken the storm.</p><p>That didn’t happen with Harvey. The hurricane churned up water 100 or even 200 meters below the surface, said Trenberth, but this water was <em>still</em> warm—meaning that the storm could keep growing and strengthening. “Harvey was not in a good position to intensify the way it did, because it was so close to land. It’s amazing it was able to do that,” he told me.</p></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector2" targeting-pos="boxinjector2" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2" data-object-pk="1" data-object-name="boxinjector"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3], [320, 520], [320, 430], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-4"><p>All of this said, a storm like Harvey could have happened even if there was no climate change. Planning experts have long fretted over the possibility of a major hurricane striking Houston. Harvey is also a powerful hurricane forming in one of the most hurricane-friendly regions of the world at the peak of hurricane season. Storms similar to it would form in any climate.</p><p>But Trenberth says that the extra heat could make the storm more costly and more powerful, overpowering and eventually breaking local drainage systems.</p><p>“The human contribution can be up to 30 percent or so of the total rainfall coming out of the storm,” he said. “It may have been a strong storm, and it may have caused a lot of problems anyway—but [human-caused climate change] amplifies the damage considerably.”</p><p>More generally, it’s still unclear what effect climate change is having on hurricane formation across the greater Atlantic Ocean. A draft version of a major U.S. government review of climate science due out later this year says there is “medium confidence” that human activities “have contributed to the observed upward trend in North Atlantic hurricane activity since the 1970s.”</p><p>Houston has been ground zero for super-damaging storms lately. It has seen four 100-year flooding events since the spring of 2015, <a href="http://grist.org/article/a-texas-size-flood-threatens-the-gulf-coast-and-were-so-not-ready/" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'5',r'538158'">according to the meteorologist Eric Holthaus</a>. The city also sees 167 percent more heavy downpours than it did in the 1950s. Meanwhile, only one-sixth of its residents have federal flood insurance, though that program has <a href="http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/Flood-insurance-program-deep-in-debt-costs-will-11009266.php" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'6',r'538158'">struggled to adjust to the increased flooding risk</a> associated with climate change.</p><p>Yet even compared to recent storms, Harvey is unprecedented—just the kind of weird weather that scientists expect to see more of as the planet warms. Harvey has already dumped more water on Harris County than Tropical Storm Allison, the area’s previous worst-ever flooding disaster in 2001, though it has only lasted half the time of that earlier storm.</p><p>And it will keep raining. As of Sunday afternoon, Buffalo Bayou, a major river near downtown Houston, is one foot above flood stage. It is projected to rise as much as another 12 feet today alone.</p><figure><div class="embed-wrapper" style="display: block; position:relative; width:100%; height:0; overflow:hidden; padding-bottom:56.25%;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="560" style="position:absolute; width:100%; height:100%; top:0; left:0; border:0;" class=" lazyload" data-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7Saq_ZYPS40?enablejsapi=1"></iframe></div></figure><section><hr><h3>Related Video</h3>
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                <a href="/author/robinson-meyer/" class="author-link">Robinson Meyer</a> is an associate editor at <em>The Atlantic</em>, where he covers technology.

                
            
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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">What Mueller's Indictment Reveals</h3>
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        <p class="dek">The special counsel detailed how a Russian effort to widen divisions in American society launched in 2014 morphed into active support for the candidacy of Donald Trump.</p>
        
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            <p>A <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/rosenstein-mueller-indictment-russia/553601/">37-page indictment </a>filed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Friday lays out the most detailed picture of how the Russian government sought to interfere in the 2016 election, meddling with voters to sow division in American society, and encouraging the election of Donald Trump in what the defendants referred to as “information warfare against the United States of America.”</p>

<p>“The conspiracy had as its object impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful governmental functions of the United States by dishonest means in order to enable the Defendants to interfere with U.S. political and electoral processes, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” the indictment states. There are 16 defendants, including three organizations and 13 individuals, who are charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States by impairing enforcement of election law as well as wire fraud and bank fraud.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Full Text of Mueller's Indictment of 13 Russians</h3>
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        <p class="dek">The special counsel indicted the Russian nationals and three Russian entities for allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election, the Department of Justice announced Friday.</p>
        
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            <p dir="ltr"><em>On Friday, February 16, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosentein announced that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, had indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities on charges that including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft. This is the full text of that <a href="https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download">indictment</a>.</em></p>

<hr><p dir="ltr" style="text-align: center;">IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT</p>

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* * CRIMINAL NO. v. * * (18 U.S.C. §§ 2,371, 1349, 1028A)</p>

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<p>INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY LLC</p>

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<p dir="ltr">CONCORD CATERING,</p>

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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Swiss Have Liberal Gun Laws, Too</h3>
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        <p class="dek">But they also have fewer gun-related deaths than the U.S.</p>
        
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            <p>In February 2011, Swiss citizens voted in a referendum that called for a national gun registry and for firearms owned by members of the military to be stored in public arsenals.</p>

<p>“It is a question of trust between the state and the citizen. The citizen is not just a citizen, he is also a soldier,” Hermann Suter, who at the time was vice president of the Swiss gun-rights group Pro Tell, told the BBC then. “The gun at home is the best way to avoid dictatorships—only dictators take arms away from the citizens.”</p>

<p>Apparently many of his fellow Swiss agreed. The referendum was easily defeated. Gun ownership in the country<strong> </strong>has <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4137689?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">deep historic roots</a> and it is tied to mandatory military service for Swiss men between the ages of 18 and 34. Traditionally, soldiers were allowed to keep their weapons at home in order to defend against conquering armies. These fears came close to being realized during the Franco-Prussian War on 1871; as well as World War I, when the Swiss border was threatened; and World War II, when the country feared a Nazi invasion.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline"><em>Black Panther</em> Is More Than a Superhero Movie</h3>
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        <p class="dek">The director Ryan Coogler's addition to the Marvel pantheon is a superb genre film—and quite a bit more.</p>
        
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            <p><strong><em>Note: Although this review avoids plot spoilers, it does discuss the thematic elements of the film at some length.</em></strong></p>

<p>After an animated introduction to the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda, <em>Black Panther</em> opens in Oakland in 1992. This may seem an odd choice, but it is in fact quite apt. The film’s director, Ryan Coogler, got his start in the city, having been born there in 1986. His filmmaking career has its roots there, too, as it was the setting for his debut feature, <em>Fruitvale Station</em>.</p>

<p>A bunch of schoolboys (a fictionalized young Coogler perhaps among them) play pickup hoops on a court with a milk-crate basket. But in the tall apartment building above them two black radicals are plotting a robbery. There’s a knock on the door and one of the men looks through the peephole: “Two Grace Jones–lookin’ chicks—with spears!” I won’t recount the rest of the scene, except to note that the commingling of two very different iterations of the term “Black Panther”—the comic-book hero and the revolutionary organization, ironically established just months apart in 1966—is in no way accidental, and it will inform everything that follows.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">There’s No Longer Any Doubt</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/adam-serwer/" itemprop="url" title="Adam Serwer" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Adam Serwer</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">The indictment unsealed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller is unequivocal about Russian efforts to help Donald Trump become president.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p dir="ltr">Shortly after his unexpected victory in the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump told <em>Time</em> in an interview that Russia had not interfered in the 2016 election.</p>

<p dir="ltr">“I don’t believe they interfered. That became a laughing point; not a talking point, a laughing point. Any time I do something, they say ‘Oh, Russia interfered,’” <a href="http://time.com/4591183/time-person-of-the-year-2016-donald-trump-interview/">Trump said</a>. “It could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”</p>

<p dir="ltr">Over the past year, Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, and the federal investigation into that interference and the possibility that the Trump campaign had abetted it, have been a sore spot for the president. He’s called the Russia investigation a “hoax,” a “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/us/politics/donald-trump-wall-hack-russia.html">political witch hunt</a>” and “fake news.” He said it was a “joke,” a “ruse,” and “phony.” “The Democrats made up and pushed the Russian story as an excuse for running a terrible campaign,” Trump insisted. Even after January of 2017, when American intelligence agencies released a report concluding that Russia had interfered in the election on Trump’s behalf, both the president and his allies continued to insist that the story was untrue. In his confirmation hearing to be attorney general, Jeff Sessions would not even acknowledge that Russia had interfered. “I have done no research into that. I know just what the media says about it,” Sessions testified.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">So You Think Someone Might Be Mentally Ill</h3>
    </a>
    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/olga-khazan/" itemprop="url" title="Olga Khazan" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Olga Khazan</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-02-16T05:00:00" />
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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">In the wake of mass shootings, some blame a failure to spot the signs of mental illness. But myriad obstacles stand in the way of getting someone good mental-health treatment.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>In the years before 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz allegedly killed 17 people in a Florida high school on Wednesday, his behavior was strange, but not necessarily criminal. And not necessarily suggestive of a specific mental illness, either. He seemed <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/14/us/nikolas-cruz-florida-shooting.html?hp&amp;action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;clickSource=story-heading&amp;module=b-lede-package-region&amp;region=top-news&amp;WT.nav=top-news">fixated on guns and on killing animals</a>, and his mother would sometimes call the police on him in an effort to manage his behavior. <a href="http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/nikolas-cruz-legally-purchased-ar-15-despite-long-history-of-mental-illness-warnings-10089980">Some news reports</a> have also said that Cruz has been “in and out of mental-health treatment,” though his diagnosis is not clear.</p>

<p>After mass shootings, opponents of gun control are often quick to suggest more mental-health treatment as a way to prevent further carnage. Yesterday morning, President Trump tweeted as much:</p>

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!</p>
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/964110212885106689?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 15, 2018</a></blockquote>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">What's Actually Behind Cape Town's Water Crisis</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/richard-poplak/" itemprop="url" title="Richard Poplak" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Richard Poplak</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">Blame austerity-obsessed technocrats, irresponsible development, and willful ignorance.</p>
        
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            <p>The city of Cape Town was plonked by its founders onto a peninsula not far from<strong> </strong>where the Indian and Atlantic oceans merge, often violently, beneath the imposing banks of Table Mountain. To its north lie the fertile fruit and wine farms that weigh down the city’s restaurant tables with unimaginable bounty. Every day when the clock strikes noon, a cannon blast echoes from Signal Hill, a reminder of the city’s colonial heritage. It was established first as a vegetable garden by the Dutch East India Company in 1652, then repurposed as a stronghold for the British until the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910; later it served as the apartheid regime’s parliamentary stronghold. In 2014, The <em>New York Times</em> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/01/10/travel/2014-places-to-go.html">declared it</a> the best place in the world to visit. Britain’s <em>Daily Telegraph</em> <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/africa/south-africa/galleries/reasons-why-cape-town-is-the-best-city-in-the-world/">concurred</a>.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">A GIF Guide to Figure Skaters' Jumps at the Olympics</h3>
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        <p class="dek">How to make sense of axels, edges, flips, and more</p>
        
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            <p style="color: #999; font-style: italic;"><small>This article is from the archive of our partner <a href="http://www.thewire.com"></a>.</small></p>

<p>Let's make no bones about it: the headlining sport in the Winter Olympics is figure skating. No other sport comes close to the drama, the athletes, the subplots, and politics that figure skating has. For skaters, all those hours, jumps and training are boiled down to around six or seven minutes. That's what makes the Olympics' skating competition so wonderful and so heartbreaking: skaters don't necessarily have to be the best, they just have to be the best for seven minutes (see: Lipinski, Tara).</p>

<p>That's why we watch. For most of us though, the benchmark of a good skate is not falling (part of the reason people were surprised that Mirai Nagasu didn't make the Olympic team despite skating a clean program). To the untrained eye, a skater just transforms into a spinning blur for a few nanoseconds, and then lands (or doesn't) while we hold our breath.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Mueller’s Indictment Puts Details Behind Claims of Russian Interference</h3>
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        <p class="dek">Thirteen Russian nationals connected to the shadowy Internet Research Agency were indicted by the special counsel on Friday.</p>
        
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            <p dir="ltr">Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals on Friday connected to Russia’s Internet Research Agency—a Kremlin-backed outfit whose employees posed as Americans and spread disinformation online in an attempt to influence the 2016 election.</p>

<p dir="ltr">The indictment details highly specific allegations—including names, dates, and the text of private messages—that appear to substantiate central elements of the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia made an active, concerted effort to subvert American democracy. That <a href="https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf">report</a>, released in January 2017, concluded that “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election,” which included “third-party intermediaries and paid social media users or ‘trolls.’” President Trump has repeatedly dismissed claims of Russian meddling as “fake news” or a “hoax.”</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Crisis Facing America's Working Daughters</h3>
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        <p class="dek"><span>Many are familiar with the challenges faced by working moms, but the troubles of women with aging parents are unseen and widely ignored.</span></p>
        
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            <p>For America’s working moms, there is pretty much an endless stream of resources to guide and comfort them on how to tell the boss they’re pregnant, how to find a private place to pump at work, how to negotiate flex time, how to split the chores at home, and whether or not to display pictures of their kids at the office<em>. </em>They can read all day and all night about the many stresses of working motherhood including pregnancy discrimination, the wage gap, the mommy wars, leaning in, and opting out.  But for America’s working daughters, there is little to help them navigate between their careers and the needs of their aging parents.</p>

<p>There are currently 44 million unpaid eldercare providers in the United States according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the majority are women. And yet there are very few support programs, formal or informal, in place to support these family caregivers, many of whom are struggling at work and at home. Working daughters often find they need to switch to a less demanding job, take time off, or quit work altogether in order to make time for their caregiving duties. As a result, they suffer loss of wages and risk losing job-related benefits such as health insurance, retirement savings, and Social Security benefits. In fact, <a href="https://www.metlife.com/mmi/research/caregiving-cost-working-caregivers.html#key%20findings">a study from MetLife and the National Alliance for Caregiving</a> calculated women lose an average $324,044 in compensation due to caregiving.</p>


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        <p class="dek">David Frum argues that if the Republican Party believes in democracy, its politicians must fight for it.</p>
        
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