Minority report: An exchange Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press underscores why one option that had been batted around--staying in the deal while explicitly softening the U.S. commitment--was rejected in the internal administration debate. Pruitt argued the wording of the deal only allows nations to make their emissions targets more aggressive, not scale them back. However, this view is not widely held among experts. For instance, E&E News noted Friday that "the vast majority of international legal experts say they can be rescinded and lowered at will." Finessing Trump: Pruitt, joining several other administration officials, declined to say whether President Trump still believes human-induced global warming is a "hoax." Pruitt noted only that Trump has "indicated the climate changes," but declined to address the scientific consensus that human activities are the main driver of the warming trend.

Under normal circumstances, this tweet wouldn't be so surprising: Lamar Smith, the chair of the committee since 2013, is a well-known climate-change denier. But these are not normal times. The tweet is best interpreted as something new: a warning shot. It's a sign of things to come--a declaration of the Trump Administration's intent to sideline science. In a 1946 essay, George Orwell wrote that "to see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."

Doha, Qatar - Faced with shrinking budgets, greater competition and increasingly selective audiences, leaders of international media organisations gathering vowed to share ideas about how best to gather and present news. "We are 20 years into the digital revolution of the media," Gary Pruitt, president of the Associated Press news agency, told a gathering in Doha of around 300 journalists from across the world. "Demand for news will only grow from here, but the supply of news will also grow. Much of it will not be of very high quality." He said that "a key component to innovation at AP is to increase work and investment into media and technology startups", adding that the agency has tested drones for news gathering purposes, and has used "robot journalism" to produce reports without human intervention.