Ellsworth Toohey: Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder, is defending the platform against Elon Musk's cartoonishly vapid attacks. In a recent New York Times interview, Wales dismisses Musk's accusation that Wikipedia is

Der Klima-Diskurs steckt in der Krise: Alle Warnungen treffen auf taube Ohren. Wie man darüber nicht verzweifelt, erklärt der Klimaforscher Stefan Rahmstorf im Gespräch.

Carla Sinclair: Calling all white Christian men: The Trump regime

Rhian Lubin: Amid growing anger about President Donald Trump’s $300 million ballroom, his administration has revised a “Major Events Timeline” on the official White House website to include scandals that hit former Democratic administrations. Former President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, along with former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, are targeted in the Trump administration’s latest efforts to troll Democrats. It comes as crews are demolishing the historic East Wing to indulge the president in his 90,000 square-foot ballroom, which he said is being paid for with private funds.Trump officials included a slide on the White House website that called Hunter Biden an “admitted drug user,” featured photos of Clinton with his arm around Monica Lewinsky, and what was claimed to be Obama with a member of the Muslim Brotherhood Islamist movement.On its official X account, the White House posted a link Thursday to the new timeline with the nail polish emoji, often used to convey sassiness or nonchalance. President Donald Trump’s team is trolling Democrats and critics of his $300 million ballroom by revising a ‘Major Events Timeline’ on the official White House website to include scandals that hit former Democratic administrations (Getty)Apart from the scandals about the former Democratic administrations, the timeline bypassed the first Trump administration and only included information about major construction dating back to 1791.From the addition of the White House Briefing Room in 1970, the timeline jumps to the “Bill Clinton Scandal” with Monica Lewinsky in 1998. “President Bill Clinton's affair with intern Monica Lewinsky was exposed, leading to White House perjury investigations. The Oval Office trysts fueled impeachment for obstruction,” the entry read, along with a photograph of Clinton with Lewinsky. Then, 14 years go by without any major events until 2012 when “Obama hosts members of the Muslim Brotherhood.”Obama met former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, who was a member of the Islamist movement, at the United Nations General Assembly in 2012. Obama administration officials also met with the group in April 2012 in what was “routine diplomatic outreach,” according to reporting at the time.Former President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, along with former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, are targeted in the Trump administration’s latest efforts to troll Democrats (whitehouse.gov)The Obama administration pointed out at the time that prominent Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham and the late John McCain, had also met with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Politico reported. A bill put forward but Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) earlier this year called to designate the group as a terrorist organization.The only event featured in the timeline from the first Trump administration is the 2020 construction of the White House tennis pavilion, overseen by First Lady Melania Trump.Trump officials took a swipe at Hunter Biden and chose to illustrate its 2023 “Cocaine Discovery” entry with a photo of him half-naked in a bathtub with a cigarette in his mouth.The post about Hunter Biden dredged up a 2023 incident where a bag of cocaine was discovered in the White House by a Secret Service agent during his father’s presidency. Hunter Biden denied the drugs were his and the Secret Service investigation came back inconclusive due to the lack of “latent fingerprints” and “insufficient DNA.”The Biden and Harris administration was also attacked on the website for acknowledging International Transgender Day of Visibility in 2023 and 2024, an annual event that was launched more than a decade ago and is celebrated every year on March 31. The Biden and Harris administration was attacked on the website for acknowledging International Transgender Day of Visibility in 2023 and 2024 (whitehouse.gov)“The Biden/Harris administration hosts transexuals at the White House in 2023, and goes on to establish the

Justine Calma: The national database on billion-dollar weather and climate disasters has found a new home after the Trump administration decided to ax it earlier this year. Thanks to researchers continuing the work despite a lack of federal support, we can keep the tally going this year — which is already proving to be one of the costliest on record.Until recently, the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) have shared data and insights on billion-dollar disasters dating back to 1980 on a federal website. NCEI stopped updating that resource in May, “in alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes,” under the Trump administration, according to the website.We can keep the tally going this year — which is already proving to be one of the costliest on recordDonald Trump has moved quickly to remove information about climate change from government websites since taking office, but has been met with legal challenges and furious efforts to archive that data by people who rely on it for their livelihoods and to inform public health and safety policies. The billion dollar disaster database and its risk map, for instance, were meant to help communities plan ahead by understanding where residents might be most vulnerable and how building codes need to adapt.The nonprofit research and advocacy group Climate Central launched its version of the database today on its own website. It similarly keeps track of weather and climate-related disasters that have led to at least $1 billion in damages. The tool includes data on disasters since 1980, and adjusts costs for inflation. Adam Smith, who was the lead scientist for NCEI’s billion dollar-disaster tool for the past 15 years, is leading the work now at Climate Central.Analyzing the first six months of this year, Climate Central found that 14 individual disasters have already cumulatively cost $101.4 billion. Those numbers are really high for the US. The nation has faced 9 separate billion-dollar disasters a year, on average, according to the research. These destructive events have become more frequent and intense since 1980. During that decade, the average was just 3 per year. The last two years have been record-smashing, with 28 and 27 such disasters each, respectively.Average annual inflation-adjusted costs have grown more than six-fold over roughly the same period of time, reaching $153.2 billion per year in the 2020s compared to $22.6 billion per year in the 80s.This year started off with the costliest wildfire event on record for the US, the inferno that tore across the greater Los Angeles area. With losses topping $60 billion, the January blazes in LA easily made the first six months of 2025 the costliest of any year so far in the database.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Justine Calma

Anne Applebaum: Lieutenant Colonel Harald Jäger was in charge of a Berlin Wall checkpoint on the evening of November 9, 1989, when a garbled televised press conference convinced thousands of East Berliners that they were allowed to cross into West Germany. People ran to the checkpoint. They started shouting at Jäger, telling him to open the barrier, even though no one had told him about any changes.Still, “when I saw the masses of East German citizens there, I knew they were in the right,” he told an interviewer, many years later. In another interview, he recalled, “At the moment it became so clear to me … the stupidity, the lack of humanity. I finally said to myself: ‘Kiss my arse. Now I will do what I think is right.’” He opened the barrier and people started walking through.Had these events taken place a few months earlier, Jäger might have kept the barrier shut. But the “masses of East German citizens” who had spent that autumn marching against dictatorship in East Berlin, Leipzig, and other East German cities had shaped his understanding of events. Watching them, he understood that most of his countrymen opposed the regime and hated the Wall. If everyone was against it, he no longer wanted to defend it.[Quinta Jurecic: Resistance is cringe—but it’s also effective]The differences between the “No Kings” demonstrations that took place across the United States on Saturday and the East German protests 36 years ago are too numerous to list. I saw no riot police at the protest I watched in Washington, D.C. Nor did the demonstrations in the autumn of 1989 feature animal costumes, cute homemade signs, or people dancing the Macarena. But they shared at least one goal: to remind the government’s supporters and enablers that the public is unhappy. The majority of Americans object to President Donald Trump’s politicization of justice, his militarization of ICE, and his usurpation of congressional power. Eventually some of those presidential supporters and enablers might, like Jäger the border guard, be persuaded to side with the majority and help bring this assault on the rule of law to an end.The people in the White House know this too, and they reacted accordingly. Trump, the successor to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, posted an AI-created video of himself as a fighter pilot, wearing a crown, flying over an American city, and dumping shit onto American protesters. The point was not subtle: Trump wanted to mock and smear millions of Americans, literally depicting them covered in excrement, precisely so that none of his own supporters would want to join them.Still image from an AI-generated video that Donald Trump shared on social media Saturday (X.com)Mockery isn’t Trump’s only tool, nor was it the only one that his team has borrowed from other autocrats and would-be autocrats around the world. Just as the Chinese leadership once described participants in popular, broad-based Hong Kong protests as “thugs” and “radicals,” the speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, said before Saturday’s protest that the only people protesting would be “Marxists” or “pro-Hamas.” Just as Russian President Vladimir Putin has called democracy protesters “paid agents of the West”—he once even claimed that Hillary Clinton, then the U.S. secretary of state, had sent “a signal” to “some actors in our country”—Ted Cruz, among others, insinuated that the millions of American protesters were paid by George Soros. A host of Republicans tried to portray the protesters as dangerous or treasonous, or else, paradoxically, as elderly and ineffective.[View: More ‘No Kings’ protests across the U.S.]For those using the oldest tools in the authoritarian playbook, the nature of the smear is unimportant. What matters is the intention behind it: Don’t answer your critics. Don’t argue with them. Don’t let them win over anyone else. Describe them as dangerous radicals even when they wear frog costumes. Imply, without evidence, that they were bribed to speak out, because there can’t possibly be any sincere idealists who criticize the Party and its Leader out of a genuine desire to help other Americans. Dump AI-generated sewage on their heads to discourage anyone else from joining them. And if they keep coming out, make the messages even harsher.We are just at the very beginning of this familiar, predictable cycle, and we know from the experience of other countries that it can lead in many directions. Protests could fizzle out, as often happens, because mocking, angry, and, in this case, scatological propaganda discourages people from joining them. Or the official reaction to them could turn uglier: Anyone who objects to the Party or the Leader will be described as not really American, not eligible for the rights of a citizen, not really entitled to protest at all. In authoritarian countries, state institutions—tax authorities, regulators, political police—would then begin to pursue them. That isn’t supposed to happen in America, but then, this isn’t an ordinary American political cycle.Alternatively, the people who showed up on Saturday might be inspired to do more. For years, Americans at protests have been chanting, “This is what democracy looks like.” But the No Kings marches are actually what free speech looks like. Democracy looks different. Democracy requires organized politics, support for candidates, the creation of broad coalitions. Protests can only create enthusiasm, spread goodwill, and inspire people to dedicate time and energy to real political change. And the people who created the sewage video knew that too.

Christian Schwägerl: Kommentar: Mit einem perfiden „racial profiling“ der gesamten Bevölkerung hat der Bundeskanzler erneut die Grenzen politischen Anstands verletzt und Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund schwer beleidigt. Seine Äußerungen verletzen den Geist von Artikel 3 des GrundgesetzesLeben in Deutschland in Zukunft 90 Millionen Menschen? (Symbolfoto)Ein Bundeskanzler muss viel reden. Wie jeder weiß, kann einem im schnellen Fluss der Worte auch mal ein Fehler unterlaufen. Man nennt es Versprecher, wenn einem unfreiwillig etwas über die Lippen rutscht. Von einem Patzer spricht man, wenn das Gesagte negative Folgen hat. Kanzler Merz hat es am Dienstag allerdings zur nächsthöheren Kategorie geschafft: der Entgleisung.Eine Entgleisung hat zur Folge, dass der Zug der aneinandergereihten Wörter anschließend im Graben liegt, weil er die vorgegebenen Schienen gesellschaftlichen Miteinanders verlassen hat. Der Schaden ist riesig und Menschen, die die Wucht der Worte trifft, verspüren einen tiefen Schmerz.In Potsdam äußerte sich der Kanzler zur Migrationspolitik. Er rühmte sich damit, dass seine Regierung schon viel unternommen und die illegale Einwanderung stark reduziert habe. Und dann sagte Merz: „Aber wir haben natürlich immer im Stadtbild noch dieses Problem.“Vom Stadtbild ist in der Bundespolitik selten die Rede. Im Kontext seines Themas, der Migration, gibt es nur wenige Merkmale dafür relevant sind: die Hautfarbe der Menschen auf den Straßen, ihre Kleidung, sowie Geschäfte, Kulturzentren oder Gotteshäuser, die Eingewanderte betreiben.Rechtsextreme werden Merz’ Satz feiernIm Stadtbild ein Problem? Man will, wenn man diese Worte hört, an zugeparkte Gehwege, marode Schulen, leblose Bürohochhäuser oder herumliegenden Müll denken – was das Stadtbild eben so beeinträchtigen kann. Aber Merz meint damit: Menschen, Mitbürger und ja, auch deutsche Staatsbürger.Es ist beschämend, wenn nach dem bayerischen Ministerpräsidenten nun der Bundeskanzler Menschen im Stadtbild zum Problem erklärt. Das ist die Sprache der AfD und noch weiter rechts stehender Gruppen. Sie werden diesen Auftritt des Kanzlers als Normalisierung ihrer extremistischen Ansichten feiern. So ein Satz würde international Beachtung finden, wenn US-Präsident Trump ihn äußern würde. Er würde ihm – zurecht – als Ausdruck von Rassismus und einer Nähe zur Ideologie der white supremacy ausgelegt. Denn die abstoßend ekelhafte Implikation von Merz Aussage ist: Das „Problem“ im Stadtbild wird geringer, wenn es weniger Menschen mit nicht-weißer Hautfarbe gibt.Ein Schlag ins Gesicht vieler MenschenMerz’ Satz ist auch ein Schlag ins Gesicht aller, die sich in den vergangenen Jahren und Jahrzehnten um ein gelingendes Miteinander, um Integration und um einen Dialog zwischen Menschen mit verschiedenen kulturellen und religiösen Hintergründen bemüht haben. Wer, der einen Migrationshintergrund hat, soll sich von Merz Äußerungen nicht angesprochen fühlen?Es wird jetzt noch klarer, dass es dem Kanzler eben nicht darum geht, illegale Einwanderung zu unterbinden und frisch Eingewanderte, die schwere Verbrechen begehen, wieder auszuweisen. Mit einer Art bundesweitem racial profiling aus dem Kanzleramt erklärt Merz die Hautfarbe und Kleidung aller Menschen, die nicht weiß und mit seinem verengten Blick „normal deutsch“ aussehen, zum Problem. Wer glaubt, so der AfD Wähler abluchsen zu können, irrt. Die rechtsextremistische Partei wird sich bestätigt sehen und das entsprechend ausschlachten.Schrille WarnsignaleLeider ist es nicht Merz’ erste Entgleisung: 2023 verunglimpfte er arabischstämmige Jungen pauschal als „kleine Paschas“ und sagte bei einem bayerischen Volksfest: „Nicht Kreuzberg ist Deutschland, Gillamoos ist Deutschland.“ Im Bundestag nahm er es in Kauf, mit der AfD eine Mehrheit zu bilden. Und bei der Wahl von Verfassungsrichtern erlaubte Merz es, dass die Bundestagsfraktion der Union sich von einer Desinformationskampagne von Rechtsaußen steuern ließ.Das sind schrille Warnsignale: Was kommt nach den Aussagen zum „Stadtbild“ als Nächstes?In Artikel 3 des Grundgesetzes steht: „Niemand darf wegen seines Geschlechtes, seiner Abstammung, seiner Rasse, seiner Sprache, seiner Heimat und Herkunft, seines Glaubens, seiner religiösen oder politischen Anschauungen benachteiligt oder bevorzugt werden.“Den Geist dieses Staatsgrundsatzes hat Merz mit seinem Satz auf eklatante Weise verletzt.

Jason: It’s a big week at OpenAlex. On Monday, we announced that OpenAlex is now our top-level brand (and retired the “OurResearch” name). Yesterday we unveiled our new logo. And today, we’re thrilled to launch the beta release of our fully-rewritten codebase (codenamed Walden)!Walden is faster, bigger, and more maintainable–that means quicker bug fixes, more content, easier feature development, and a smoother experience all around.Throughout October, we’ll be running Walden and the old system (Classic) side by side, with Classic remaining the default. On November 1 2025, Walden becomes default, and we’ll publish the last data snapshot from the old system (more info on timelines here).How to test-drive WaldenWalden beta is already live in the API and UI so you can start exploring it right away!In the UI: click the little test-tube icon in the top right (or click here).In the API: just add data-version=2 to your request, like this: https://api.openalex.org/works?data-version=2.In OREO: Compare Classic to Walden using the OpenAlex Rewrite Evaluation Overview (OREO, yum). Using OREO you can see exactly what’s changed (good and bad), view known issues, and track our continuous improvements throughout our October betaJust remember that it’s still in beta: there are lots of known issues and it’s changing every day. If you notice an that’s not already in OREO tests or known issues, report it here.Key improvementsWhen you check it out, what should you expect to see? The best way to view a list of improvements is to check out the tests in OREO, especially work tests. But here’s a high-level overview:150M new works: Newly indexed articles, books, datasets, software, dissertations, and more! You can explore just the newly added works here.Better consistency: Unpaywall and OpenAlex will now always agree.Better metadata: more citations, more language and retraction coverage, better keywords, more OA data.Looking AheadThe last year of rewriting OpenAlex was tough. We couldn’t move as fast as we wanted on new features, and support often lagged. But now we’re equipped to move fast without breaking things. Expect faster improvements, better support, and more ambitious features dropping in Q4, including:Community curation: fix mistakes (like in Wikipedia) and see them reflected in days.Vector search endpoint: find relevant works and other entities based on semantic similarity of free-form textDownload endpoint: Access PDF text from DOI or OpenAlex IDBetter funding metadata: New grants entity with better coverage of grant objects and linkages to research outputs and fundersThis is a turning point for OpenAlex—and we’re excited to build the future of research infrastructure together with you. The engine’s rebuilt. The road ahead is wide open. Let’s go.PS want to learn more about Walden? Come to our webinar Oct 7th at 10am Eastern. You can register to attend here.The post OpenAlex rewrite enters beta! � appeared first on OpenAlex blog.

Wolf Hosbach: Wikimedia Deutschland, Betreiber von Wikidata, öffnet seine strukturierten Daten als vektorisierte Embeddings für die Nutzung durch LLMs per MCP.

Jason: For years, we’ve been working under the name OurResearch. That name sat at the top of our org chart, with three child projects under it: OpenAlex, Unpaywall, and Unsub.Starting today, things are simpler: that org chart now has just one parent—OpenAlex—with Unpaywall and Unsub beneath it.Why the change? Three reasons:1. Fewer brands is clearerWe’re a tiny team, and having so many brands has always been confusing. People wondered: are we OurResearch (or Our Research), or OpenAlex, or Unpaywall, or something else? From now on, the answer is simple: we’re OpenAlex.2. OpenAlex is what we doMore and more, OpenAlex is the center of our work. It’s our biggest project and the one that takes most of our time. And it’s also the data engine behind our other projects: Unpaywall and Unsub both run on OpenAlex data. In fact, with the launch of our fully rewritten OpenAlex codebase (codenamed Walden) this week, Unpaywall runs as a subroutine of the OpenAlex codebase.So in a real sense, Unpaywall and Unsub are just friendly wrappers around OpenAlex. Improving OpenAlex improves them automatically.And the name OpenAlex, with its homage to the ancient Library of Alexandria, captures our long-term vision to gather, organize, and make open all scholarly information.3. New name, new startLegally, nothing dramatic is happening—our official name has always been Impactstory, Inc., and “OurResearch” was just a DBA. But this moment is more than just a bookkeeping change.This is a new chapter for us. The past year has been tough: not much visible progress, a lot of repaying technical debt, and a long slog to rewrite our entire codebase. But that rewrite launches (in beta) this week. And with a fresh codebase comes a fresh start: we get to focus harder, move faster, and pour our energy into making OpenAlex as comprehensive, accurate, and open as possible.So yes, the name change simplifies things. But more importantly, it marks a new focus and a renewed commitment to our vision: building a universal library of scholarship.And while we’ll continue to support Unpaywall and Unsub for now, we want to be transparent: OpenAlex is the future. As its functionality grows over the next year or two, Unpaywall and Unsub users will be able to meet their use-cases directly via OpenAlex. The rising tide of OpenAlex lifts all boats.This week is about OpenAlexThis post is the first of three announcements:Monday: our name change to OpenAlex (that’s today).Tuesday: our new logo.Wednesday: the beta launch our fully rewritten OpenAlex codebase.When we say we’re focusing on OpenAlex, it’s not just words—we’re shipping, this week. And there’s more coming in Q4:A new API endpoint to directly download PDFs and parsed PDFs.A self-serve curation portal (think Wikipedia editing, but for scholarly metadata), where your changes go live in a day or two.A new vector search API.Improved funder coverage, thanks to our new Wellcome Trust grant.After a year of rebuilding, we’ve finally got the tools and the focus we need start delivering more substantively on our vision: a universal, open library of scholarly information. We’re energized. We’re ready. We’re OpenAlex.The post We’re now OpenAlex appeared first on OpenAlex blog.

Io Dodds: In 1863, at the height of the Civil War, two Baton Rouge photographers captured an image of a former slave's horrifically scarred back that shocked white Americans across the Union.Now that photo is among dozens of exhibits about slavery at several national parks, which have reportedly been ordered removed by the Trump administration.According to The Washington Post, National Park Service officials have taken exception to various signs and displays at the Harpers Ferry National Historic Park in West Virginia and George Washington's old house in Philadelphia, where the first U.S. president kept nine slaves. All were deemed to violate Trump's executive order on

Ellsworth Toohey: Look who just discovered their love for gun control! MAGA, that bastion of

Eva-Maria Weiß: (Bild: photoschmidt/ Shutterstock.com)Wer KI-Agenten im Browser nutzt, lasse Big Tech entscheiden, was man sieht, sagt Vivaldi. Man sei nur noch ein passiver Zuschauer. Alle gängigen Browseranbieter stellen KI-Agenten zur Verfügung. Manche KI-Unternehmen entwickeln Browser, die auf den KI-Agenten basieren. Nur Vivaldi nicht. Das norwegische Unternehmen, das den gleichnamigen Browser entwickelt, stellt sich gegen diesen Trend.

Jason: We recently announced that we’d completely rewritten Unpaywall to make it faster, more accurate, and (most importantly) easier to fix and improve. We wanted to move Unpaywall from product to process, something we could continuously improve along with the community.Well, we’ve been working hard on that over the last few months and here’s an update!Better Gold coverageBy far the most common OA color is gold. In fact, based on our manual sampling, 25% of Crossref DOIs are gold OA, which is much higher than I’d expected and much higher than it used to be. (note: in this and all following stats we exclude component DOIs, which aren’t indexed in Unpaywall).Coverage of gold is very tricky, because it’s all about the status of the work’s source, not the work itself. So we need very comprehensive coverage of sources, which is as hard as it sounds.Of course there’s DOAJ which is fantastic but they only cover a small subset of gold OA journals. And even for those journals, DOAJ often only tells us that a given journal is fully OA since a certain date—we still need to figure out if the back catalog is open or not.In recent weeks, we’ve finished several projects to add the “this is gold OA” flag to new journals:We crawled 50k OJS journals, adding gold status to 17,000 of them (many thanks to Juan Pablo Alperin and Diego Chavarro for their help in getting a list of OJS journals!)We marked 1,200 new journals gold using data from J-STAGE.We marked 100 new journals gold using data from SciELOWe added gold status to several dozen journals from fully-OA publishers including including MDPI, Academic Journals, and Edorium.We also modified our algorithm to assign gold instead of bronze when we know an article is OA, but we can’t figure out its source. Since gold is 2.5x more common than bronze, this will result in fewer errors overall.Overall, this has made a big change in our gold coverage: now 19% of Unpaywall is gold, compared to 14% in May.Green OAWe’ve made several changes in our green OA approach. These have not increased our total green percentage, but they have made our assignment of colors more consistent.The rule for green has always been that if the best OA location is in a repository, it’s green. But, like gold, this is very dependent on us correctly describing the source as a repository. We’re very good at this for institutional repositories—but we’ve not been so good for preprint and data repositories, which are both much more common today then they were when we started Unpaywall.Other changesWe fixed a bug causing us to list works published under the Elsevier User License as Hybrid. Since we don’t consider that to be an OA license, we moved these to bronze.We marked SSRN as an open repository…it’s on the bubble but since all works are available free right away, for us it counts.ResultsThe “ground truth” dataset is a random sample of 500 DOIs from Crossref. It excludes component DOIs and DOIs that don’t resolve. Each DOI is manually annotated by our team, which often includes doing lots of research on the journals and repositories that host the content. The definitions of oa_status colors come from here, which is in turn based on the original 2018 Unpaywall paper in PeerJ.As you can see, we’re moving in the correct direction when it comes to gold and hybrid, green isn’t changing, and bronze coverage is going backwards a bit, although it’s still pretty close to the ground truth number. Our roadmap will prioritize green and gold for the next few months at least.The futureThe most important change for Unpaywall moving forward is the upcoming rewrite of OpenAlex, which will be gradually rolled out October-November of this year. That’s because when this rewrite is deployed, OpenAlex and Unpaywall will finally share the exact same codebase. Of course this will eliminate those pesky, embarrassing bugs where Unpaywall and OpenAlex disagree. But more importantly, it’ll link the large Unpaywall and OpenAlex communities, allowing everyone to improve both products together.Even before that, though, we’ll be unveiling another exciting change: a new and improved curation portal. This will make it easier to fix article-level bugs in Unpaywall, including bugs that current curation solution doesn’t address (like missing PDF URLs and incorrect licenses). Even cooler, though it’ll allow users to fix source-level bugs, particularly fixing journals that should be marked gold, but aren’t. Although someday AI might let us automate this, for now, we think that active community curation is the only viable way to keep that data accurate and up to date. The unification of OpenAlex and Unpaywall codebases means that all these changes will propagate to both systems within days.Ok, that’s all for now! Thanks for your support and as always, please get in touch with any suggestions or feedback!The post Unpaywall improvements: more gold, better green appeared first on OurResearch blog.

Justin Baragona: Over the past week, Gavin Newsom’s press office has been deliberately aping Donald Trump’s over-the-top social media posting style in an obvious attempt to not only troll the president’s most ardent defenders but also force them to come to grips with Trump’s bullying and bombastic tone.The pitch-perfect parody, which comes as the California governor goes on the attack against Trump while clearly eying a run for president, has also resulted in a number of Fox News stars taking the bait – and seemingly making Newsom’s point for him.“DANA ‘DING DONG’ PERINO (NEVER HEARD OF HER UNTIL TODAY!) IS MELTING DOWN BECAUSE OF ME, GAVIN C. NEWSOM!” the governor’s press office account tweeted on Tuesday. “FOX HATES THAT I AM AMERICA’S MOST FAVORITE GOVERNOR (

Holly Baxter: After Friday’s red carpet love-in with Russian president Vladimir Putin, President Trump sat down with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky today at the Oval Office to talk peace and the world hoped it would go better than the last White House meeting between the U.S. and Ukraine. Before meeting with Zelensky, or any other world leaders in town for the event, Trump was already telling reporters that peace could come “almost immediately” if Zelensky ditched NATO and gifted Putin Crimea - the diplomatic equivalent of telling someone to end a mugging by handing over their wallet and the deed to their house. Zelensky, of course, is a man in the awkward position of being the democratically elected leader of the country Trump’s friend is currently trying to dismantle. And the body language of today’s meeting told its own story: gone were the grinning asides and admiring jokes, replaced with the brittle civility of a man forced to pose with the victim while still swooning over the perpetrator.Zelensky, perched on the edge of his seat while Trump leaned back, opened by thanking Trump for arranging the meeting. Inevitably, he wore a suit rather than his signature military fatigues. Anyone who witnessed the horror of their last Oval Office encounter will recall how he was repeatedly chided by the president, J.D. Vance and far-right reporter Brian Glenn for not “suiting up.” Zelensky was also criticized for not being “grateful” enough — which explains why today he began by thanking Trump for arranging the meeting.Luckily for Zelensky and unluckily for the rest of us, it became clear that Trump wasn’t going to do a repeat performance of February’s attack — because he had other things on his mind anyway. Questions from the gathered media were direct: “Is today’s meeting ‘deal or no deal?’” asked one.Trump equivocated. “I can never say that.” What could he say, then? Well, it soon became unfortunately apparent.“This isn’t my war, this is Joe Biden’s war. He’s the one who —” There was a pause, where it seemed like the president was genuinely about to suggest that Biden started the war in Ukraine himself, before he ended up at “—had a lot to do with that happening.” No mention of Putin, of course. I mean, why would there be?And then it went on. And on, and on, and on. Asked directly about what was happening in Ukraine, Trump would wheel out an irritated, detail-free “We’re going to have lasting peace,” before going right back to his own agenda.Donald Trump spoke to reporters in the Oval Office alongside Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky. They started talking about peace - but then Trump meandered into his usual complaints. (REUTERS)“I used to get great publicity. Now I get the worst publicity that anyone’s ever had in office,” he said, after an unconnected question. Moments later, apropos nothing: “Joe Biden’s a very corrupt politician — not a smart man, by the way. Go back 40 years and he wasn’t smart then, either.” This tirade continued for a while, took a left turn into how the 2020 election was supposedly stolen from him, and ended with a Biden jab: “He was a horrible, corrupt president!” Zelensky had only minutes to talk about a one-and-a-half-year-old child who had just been killed in Kharkiv by Russian missiles.And Trump went right back to carrying on. Trump wants to end “corrupt” mail-in ballots and “the machines” (never mind the defamation lawsuits already lost by right-wing media spreading conspiracy theories about voting machines giving inaccurate results.) Mail-in voting is “a fraud” and “the Democrats want it because it’s the only way they get elected.” By the way, they also want “transgender for everybody.” And “they love crime”. Zelensky was, at this point, shifting a little uncomfortably in his chair. Utterly nonplussed, Trump continued. His freewheeling narrative alighted, for a second, on immigration: “In 90 days, not one person came in illegally to our country. Even I find that hard to believe!” And some more stuff about how the Democrats had let the southern border get out of control. A final question, attempting to get the president back onto a topic even remotely related to the Ukrainian leader seated opposite him, ended up with: “I love the Ukrainian people but I love all people. I love Russian people. I love them all.”This meeting, unlike February, didn’t have Oval Office confrontations. However, that didn’t mean it was better. (Samuel Corum/PA Wire)The stand-out moment was probably when Zelensky responded to a reporter’s question about why elections are difficult to arrange during active wartime, in terms of logistics. Having taken a while to explain how much extra security is needed, he then added that democratic elections in Ukraine would soon be arranged. And with a laugh, Trump said, “‘So you’re saying if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections?” For any other politician, this might mark somewhat of a career low point. But of course today, under the Trump administration, it was just Monday.And so, somehow, Biden — who isn’t even in the room, who hasn’t been for months — became the central villain of the narrative, eclipsing both Putin and the ongoing missile strikes killing civilians. It’s a remarkable inversion: the man praising the aggressor, lecturing the victim and saving his deepest rage for his domestic rival. If you want to know what obsessions animate Trump’s foreign policy, don’t look to maps of Ukraine; look to the 2020 election.I’ll admit to believing that it couldn’t get worse than the school bully-style treatment of Zelensky last time he visited Washington, but this was worse. To listen to this press conference, you’d think Biden really was the one rolling tanks into Donetsk. A grievance recital that used the background of war for the foreground of Trump’s hurt feelings is so much less than what the world deserves.We all saw the red carpet on Friday, the festival-style “ALASKA 2026” and the photo-ops. We all saw the apathy today. Civilians die in Kharkiv, Europe flies in en masse to prop up Ukraine and Trump still finds a way to make the story about his ratings, his stolen thunder, his petty personal rants. If Friday was Broadway-style theater, today was a tragicomedy. And somehow, in the midst of war and mourning, the only thing that got center stage was Trump’s ego.

State Department reports portray Germany as more oppressive than El Salvador.

Alexandra Petri: Thank goodness the National Guard is being called in. Lawlessness in D.C. is rampant, and someone needs to take a stand!Stephen Miller was correct to point out that D.C. is awash in crime. Everywhere he looks: criminals. He can barely take three steps without running into one. From the moment he arrives at work in the morning until the second he leaves, one crime after another, piling horrendously high. Illegality everywhere, and casual disregard for the well-being of law-abiding Americans!Some people say that being around crime is just the price of living in a city, and that those intimidated by it just need to toughen up. But it’s so brazen!Get off the Metro at any point in D.C., but especially near the White House, and you might encounter one of these miscreants, flaunting their impunity in broad daylight. Why isn’t law enforcement doing its job? Members of the violent January 6 mob, released back on the streets! A man who three whistleblowers alleged had told Department of Justice employees to ignore a court order and say “Fuck you” to a judge, headed to the federal bench! The people who dismantled the Department of Education, which had been established by an act of Congress, just wandering around!The Supreme Court ultimately decided the dismantling was okay, but the justices weren’t guaranteed to feel that way! There is a word for when you do something that seems illegal and just hope that a judge will let you off. But that’s the trouble with D.C. These judges are just giving slaps on the wrist for the most egregious offenses. And that invites more crime! Now, wherever Stephen looks, people are taking the Constitution as a mere suggestion. With judges like this, you could order SEAL Team Six to assassinate somebody, and you might get away with it. Who could feel safe in a city where that was true?Some madman recently filled the streets with weapons of war! Tanks! Actual tanks! Forget brandishing a gun in a public place—he insisted on tanks!Everywhere, there are people breaking the law, or trying to. Even the man Stephen works for turns out to be a convicted felon, who once said that “when you’re a celebrity, they let you do it.” He also urged a mob of people to descend on the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically.” Technically, not a crime but—an impeachable offense! He accepted a plane from Qatar. He stored classified documents in a bathroom! Never mind what his company was doing in New York State, or what E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit found. The things he is trying to do via executive order boggle the mind! And you should see his associates!The point is, crime is everywhere, if only you know where to look. Including in other neighborhoods of the city, but surely those crimes are best dealt with on a local level, and parachuting in federal law enforcement with an unclear mandate will only make the situation worse.Instead, the National Guard ought to focus on tackling the major terror on the streets of this city! Why, at any moment you or your neighbor could get yanked into an unmarked van by a masked man, without any regard for habeas corpus. Los Angeles all over again! How can anyone feel safe while this keeps happening? People who are trying to do everything the right way, snatched from hallways after their court hearings. Professors, detained after expressing their views. Americans who just want to work hard and support their families, petrified to go to work every day because of the shameless wrongdoers in D.C. and what they have unleashed. And whoever masterminded the abduction of so many people—seized without due process and whisked away to a foreign gulag—is still at large, and staring back at Stephen every time he looks into a mirror. Not safe, not safe!Thank goodness the National Guard is being called in. Lawlessness in D.C. is rampant, and someone needed to take a stand!Oh. Oh, I see. Never mind.About the AuthorAlexandra PetriAlexandra Petri is a staff writer at The Atlantic.