Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

Russia’s clandestine chemical weapons program and the GRU’s Unit 29155

Russia’s clandestine chemical weapons program and the GRU’s Unit 29155

Bellingcat Investigation Team reports: On October 15, 2020, the European Union imposed sanctions on six senior Russian officials and a leading Russian research institute over the alleged use of a nerve agent from the Novichok family in the poisoning of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. Russia dismissed as baseless the EU’s allegations that it had not complied with its obligations, under the convention it ratified in 1997, to discontinue its chemical weapons program. Russian officials said the country had nothing to…

Read More Read More

Homo erectus, not humans, may have invented bone tools at least 800,000 years ago

Homo erectus, not humans, may have invented bone tools at least 800,000 years ago

Science News reports: A type of bone tool generally thought to have been invented by Stone Age humans got its start among hominids that lived hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens evolved, a new study concludes. A set of 52 previously excavated but little-studied animal bones from East Africa’s Olduvai Gorge includes the world’s oldest known barbed bone point, an implement probably crafted by now-extinct Homo erectus at least 800,000 years ago, researchers say. Made from a piece…

Read More Read More

In the calm before the possible storm, it doesn’t look like courts will decide the election

In the calm before the possible storm, it doesn’t look like courts will decide the election

CNN reports: The doomsday scenario of lawyers and judges setting surprise terms for voting or even deciding the election this year has loomed large. Yet that likelihood is diminishing by the day, several elections law experts say, with the terms for voting already essentially set in many states and a calm coming over the courts in pre-Election Day litigation. The focus on courts has been extreme at times this year, especially with President Donald Trump pushing for the confirmation of…

Read More Read More

North Carolina is the center of the political universe as the state’s demographics shift dramatically

North Carolina is the center of the political universe as the state’s demographics shift dramatically

CNN reports: Donald Trump has a math problem in North Carolina. The state the President won by more than 3 percentage points four years ago has continued its gradual political transformation, moving away from the red states to its south and toward its bluer neighbors to the north. The transformation has been propelled by a mix of factors: The state is growing more diverse with Hispanic and Asian immigrants, its cities and suburbs are booming with unbridled growth from northern…

Read More Read More

Five states where the threat of militia activity around the elections is the highest

Five states where the threat of militia activity around the elections is the highest

NPR reports: Five states — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Oregon — have the highest risk of seeing increased militia activity around the elections: everything from demonstrations to violence. That’s the conclusion of a new report by ACLED, a crisis-mapping project, and the research group MilitiaWatch. They worked together to map out potential hot spots for militia-style activities around the elections. Their report looks at states where militias have had recruitment drives and training, where they have cultivated relationships with…

Read More Read More

Most people arrested in protests aren’t leftist radicals

Most people arrested in protests aren’t leftist radicals

The Associated Press reports: President Donald Trump portrays the hundreds of people arrested nationwide in protests against racial injustice as violent urban left-wing radicals. But an Associated Press review of thousands of pages of court documents tells a different story. Very few of those charged appear to be affiliated with highly organized extremist groups, and many are young suburban adults from the very neighborhoods Trump vows to protect from the violence in his reelection push to win support from the…

Read More Read More

To deter immigration, the Trump administration kidnapped children

To deter immigration, the Trump administration kidnapped children

In an editorial, the Washington Post says: The Trump administration’s immorality, cruelty and bureaucratic malpractice in tearing migrant toddlers, tweens and teens away from their parents in 2017 and 2018 were the work of many co-conspirators, most of them faithfully carrying out the wishes of the president himself. A draft report by the Justice Department’s inspector general has made that clear. Perhaps even more shocking is that policy’s present-day legacy: More than 500 children who, having been wrenched from their…

Read More Read More

One in four Britons believe in QAnon-linked theories, survey finds

One in four Britons believe in QAnon-linked theories, survey finds

The Guardian reports: One in four people in Britain agree with conspiracies propagated by QAnon, the global movement claiming there is a secret satanic network of child-abusing politicians and celebrities, a survey has found. The research for Hope Not Hate also found that 17% of people questioned said they believed Covid-19 was intentionally released as part of a “depopulation plan” by the UN or “new world order”. It found that QAnon, which originated in the US where the FBI has…

Read More Read More

Turbulent environment set the stage for leaps in human evolution and technology 320,000 years ago

Turbulent environment set the stage for leaps in human evolution and technology 320,000 years ago

Drilling 139 meters down to volcanic rock provided scientists with a million-year environmental record. Human Origins Program, Smithsonian By Richard Potts, Smithsonian Institution People thrive all across the globe, at every temperature, altitude and landscape. How did human beings become so successful at adapting to whatever environment we wind up in? Human origins researchers like me are interested in how this quintessential human trait, adaptability, evolved. At a site in Kenya, my colleagues and I have been working on this…

Read More Read More

GOP pollster Frank Luntz blasts Trump campaign as worst he’s ever seen

GOP pollster Frank Luntz blasts Trump campaign as worst he’s ever seen

The Hill reports: Prominent Republican pollster Frank Luntz blasted President Trump and his campaign on Tuesday for focusing on Hunter Biden in the stretch run to Election Day, calling Trump’s campaign the worst he’s ever seen and saying the president’s advisers should be “brought up on charges of political malpractice.” Speaking at a briefing for the British strategic advising company Global Counsel, Luntz said Trump’s advisers have “their heads up their asses” if they think Hunter Biden will be a…

Read More Read More

Trump calls on Barr to ‘act’ against Biden before election

Trump calls on Barr to ‘act’ against Biden before election

The New York Times reports: President Trump on Tuesday called on William P. Barr, the attorney general, to take action before Election Day against his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., over his son’s foreign work, an extraordinary attempt to pressure the government’s chief law enforcement to help him politically. The president made the remark during an interview with “Fox & Friends,” after days of caustic criticism of Mr. Biden, the moderators of the presidential debates, the…

Read More Read More

Parents of 545 children still not found three years after Trump separation policy

Parents of 545 children still not found three years after Trump separation policy

The Guardian reports: Three years after Donald Trump ordered a crackdown on undocumented migrants crossing into the US, lawyers are still struggling to find the parents of 545 children separated from them under the “zero-tolerance” policy, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. In a court filing, the ACLU said that about two-thirds of the parents had been deported back to the country of origin in Central America, leaving their separated children behind. In the rush to carry out Trump’s…

Read More Read More

Project Veritas’s ambitious intelligence-gathering apparatus disclosed in deposition testimony

Project Veritas’s ambitious intelligence-gathering apparatus disclosed in deposition testimony

The New York Times reports: A British former spy recruited by Erik Prince, the security contractor close to the Trump administration, played a central role in a secretive effort to hire dozens of operatives for the conservative group Project Veritas, deposition testimony shows. Job applicants traveled to Wyoming in 2017 for interviews with the former intelligence officer, Richard Seddon, as Project Veritas sought to expand its operations early in the Trump administration, according to a lawsuit deposition reviewed by The…

Read More Read More

Administration officials alarmed by White House push to fast track lucrative 5G spectrum contract, sources say

Administration officials alarmed by White House push to fast track lucrative 5G spectrum contract, sources say

CNN reports: Senior officials throughout various departments and agencies of the Trump administration tell CNN they are alarmed at White House pressure to grant what would essentially be a no-bid contract to lease the Department of Defense’s mid-band spectrum — premium real estate for the booming and lucrative 5G market — to Rivada Networks, a company in which prominent Republicans and supporters of President Donald Trump have investments. The pressure campaign to fast track Rivada’s “Request for Proposal” (RFP) by…

Read More Read More