After weeks of speculation, chemical giant Bayer and biotech behemoth Monsanto have cleared a significant regulatory hurdle in their bid to consolidate into one company through a multibillion-dollar deal that critics are calling the “merger from Hell.”

“The coming together of these two is a marriage made in hell—bad for farmers, bad for consumers, and bad for our countryside.”
—Adrian Bebb, Friends of the Earth Europe

Ahead of its April deadline, on Wednesday the European Commission—the European Union’s executive arm—approved Bayer’s proposed takeover of U.S.-based Monsanto, claiming that concessions made by the companies alleviated competition concerns that critics have raised with regulators in both Europe and the United States.

Although the Commission’s decision is a major win for the  companies, U.S. regulators have not yet weighed in. Still, Wednesday’s announcement alarmed activists that have spent months protesting the deal.

“This merger will create the world’s biggest and most powerful agribusiness corporation, which will try to force its genetically modified seeds and toxic pesticides into our food and countryside,” warned Adrian Bebb, a food and farming campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe.

“The Commission decision also allows them, together with BASF, to become data giants in agriculture—the ‘Facebooks of farming’—with all the pitfalls that entails,” Bebb added. “The coming together of these two is a marriage made in hell—bad for farmers, bad for consumers, and bad for our countryside.”

BASF—a German company, like Bayer—has agreed to buy assets from Bayer, which has been key to winning over regulators.

“The Commission ignored a million people who called on them to block this deal, and caved in to lobbying to create a mega-corporation which will dominate our food supply.”
—Nick Flynn, Avaaz

On Tuesday, in front a scrum of White House reporters, the President of the United States of America Donald J. Trump swept what may have been dandruff off the shoulder of visiting French President Emmanual Macron.

“We have to make him perfect,” Trump said after doing so. “He is perfect.”

In case presidential historians from either country ever forget, here’s what that moment looked like:

It might seem out of character for the most powerful man on the world to do somthing so utterly bizarre, until you remember this telling moment at the NATO summit in Brussels last year, when Trump pushed Montenegro’s Prime Minister Dusko Markovic out of the way in order to be at the front of a group photo.

A recent study offers data to support the commonly-held notion that the news media are staffed largely by Americans from “elite” educational backgrounds—likely placing serious limits on the perspective top news outlets are able to offer about the nation and people on which they are tasked with reporting.

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Researchers from Psychology Today and the Autism and Developmental Medicine Institute analyzed the universities and colleges attended by nearly 2,000 employees of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, finding that significant portions of the staff attended one of 29 schools classified as elite.

The schools, including Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, had the highest median SAT scores in the country—but many factors keep students with high levels of cognitive ability from achieving high scores on SAT’s, and out of the nation’s most selective schools.

“There are cognitively elite students at many schools; they just cluster in numbers in the ones we identified obviously,” Kaja Perina, one of the study’s authors, told The Intercept. “The fact is the combination of social networks plus high ability tends to get these people out of the Ivy Leagues and into these top papers with much more frequency.”

According to the study, about 44 percent of Times employees attended “elite” schools, while nearly 50 percent of those at the Journal went to one of the 29 top colleges.

In what’s being called a “stunning reality check,” a new study published in the journal Science reveals that despite global efforts to safeguard biodiversity by establishing nature reserves, nearly a third of the world’s “protected land is under intense human pressure.”

“For us to find such a significant amount of human infrastructure in places governments have set aside for safeguarding biodiversity is staggering.”
—James Watson, conservation scientist

While more than 90 percent of protected land worldwide has been degraded to some degree due to human activity, 32.8 percent—more than 2.3 million square miles—has been significantly impacted by human activity, according to the report.

“What we found was massive amounts of high-level human infrastructure, for example mining activity, industrial logging activity, industrial agriculture, townships, roads, and energy,” lead author James Watson, a conservation scientist at the University of Queensland in Australia, told the Guardian.

“These are the places that nations have said they are setting aside for nature’s needs not human needs,” he added. “So for us to find such a significant amount of human infrastructure in places governments have set aside for safeguarding biodiversity is staggering.”

Watson and fellow researcher Kendall Jones explained the results of their study in a video produced by the University of Queensland:

Although the damage was most common in densely populated parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe, researchers emphasized that it is a global issue. Their findings bolster concerns generated from other recent reports that have shown that human activity—most notably, anthropogenic climate change—is causing “a major biodiversity crisis.”

Guy Midgley, a world-renowned expert on biodiversity and professor at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University, issued warnings this week about the impact of global warming on the planet’s species alongside his latest report, also published in Science.

After President Donald Trump decided late Monday to cancel an event with the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles after realizing that less than 10 players would attend—a move Philly mayor Jim Kenney mocked as further proof that the president is a “fragile egomaniac”—Trump announced on Twitter that he will instead host his own event Tuesday afternoon featuring the U.S. Army Chorus and Marine Band “playing the National Anthem.”

Given the president’s well-known obsession with militaristic ceremonies and self-adulation, the alternative event promises to be a bizarre spectacle. One critic characterized it as little more than a “patriotic circle jerk.”

“It’s a cowardly act to cancel the celebration because the majority of the people don’t want to see you. To make it about the anthem is foolish.”
—Torrey Smith, former Eagles wide receiver

“The United States Marine Band and the U.S. Army Chorus performing for a president throwing a party for himself instead of the Philadelphia Eagles should make for some of the weirdest concert video ever,” Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi noted in a tweet on Tuesday.

While Trump claimed his decision to call off the original White House event with Eagles players was because of their refusal to “proudly stand for the National Anthem,” observers were quick to note that the cancellation appears to have been entirely about the possibility of embarrassingly low turnout.