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Some Neanderthals hunted bigger animals, across a larger range, than modern humans

Some Neanderthals hunted bigger animals, across a larger range, than modern humans

Neanderthals were evolutionary cousins to our species, Homo sapiens. Chettaprin.P / Shutterstock By Bethan Linscott, University of Oxford The region of Estremadura in Portugal was home to a band of Neanderthals – an ancient evolutionary relative of modern humans – about 95,000 years ago. They made use of the patchwork of limestone caves, crags and river valleys, leaving traces of their activities in the form of stone tools, butchered animal bones and the remnants of fireplaces. Now their teeth are…

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The far right is splintering

The far right is splintering

Juliette Kayyem writes: As Judge Amit Mehta sentenced Stewart Rhodes yesterday to 18 years in prison—the longest yet for a defendant involved in the January 6 insurrection—he explained why the leader of the far-right group the Oath Keepers needed to be behind bars for a long time. “You pose an ongoing threat and peril to our democracy and the fabric of this country,” Mehta told Rhodes. Mehta was right about that. At his sentencing, Rhodes was unrepentant. In a 20-minute…

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Florida mom sought to ban Amanda Gorman’s poem while also promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Florida mom sought to ban Amanda Gorman’s poem while also promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

JTA reports: [Miami-area mother, Daily] Salinas’ Facebook feed reflects the kinds of right-wing memes that continue to circulate widely, although she told JTA that she did not post everything on it herself. Miami Against Fascism also shared video of Salinas with the Proud Boys, a far-right group with ties to antisemitic activists, as well as a video of her attending a school board protest last year with Moms For Liberty, a “parents’ rights” group active in pushing for book removals…

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Are the anti-Trump GOP forces starting to implode?

Are the anti-Trump GOP forces starting to implode?

Jonathan Martin writes: Will this go down as the week that the grand plan to deny Donald Trump the nomination fell apart? For months, high-level Republican lawmakers, donors and strategists eager to block Trump have described, in separate conversations with me, an endgame to the presidential primary. When it becomes clear in the early state and national polling who is consolidating support, the most influential figures with ties to the lagging candidates will stage a sort of political intervention and…

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Russian public appears to be souring on war casualties, analysis shows

Russian public appears to be souring on war casualties, analysis shows

The New York Times reports: Public sentiment in Russia over war casualties has been turning more negative during the intense fighting in recent months in eastern Ukraine, according to a new analysis. U.S. officials have highlighted the huge numbers of Russian troops killed and wounded in Bakhmut, Ukraine, in recent months, which they estimate to be more than 100,000. The city has become the scene of the most intense urban combat in Europe since World War II. Those losses appear…

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Tech layoffs ravage the teams that fight online misinformation and hate speech

Tech layoffs ravage the teams that fight online misinformation and hate speech

CNBC reports: Toward the end of 2022, engineers on Meta’s team combating misinformation were ready to debut a key fact-checking tool that had taken half a year to build. The company needed all the reputational help it could get after a string of crises had badly damaged the credibility of Facebook and Instagram and given regulators additional ammunition to bear down on the platforms. The new product would let third-party fact-checkers like The Associated Press and Reuters, as well as…

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Ancient humans may have paused in Arabia for 30,000 years on their way out of Africa

Ancient humans may have paused in Arabia for 30,000 years on their way out of Africa

Shutterstock By Ray Tobler, Australian National University; Shane T Grey, Garvan Institute, and Yassine Souilmi, University of Adelaide Most scientists agree modern humans developed in Africa, more than 200,000 years ago, and that a great human diaspora across much of the rest of the world occurred between perhaps 60,000 and 50,000 years ago. In new research published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, we have uncovered dozens of distinctive historical changes in the human genome to reveal a…

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Why color is in the eye of the beholder

Why color is in the eye of the beholder

James Fox writes: In February 2015, a Scottish woman uploaded a photograph of a dress to the internet. Within 48 hours the blurry snapshot had gone viral, provoking spirited debate around the world. The disagreement centred on the dress’s colour: some people were convinced it was blue and black while others were adamant it was white and gold. Everyone, it seemed, was incredulous. People couldn’t understand how, faced with exactly the same photograph of exactly the same dress, they could…

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Supreme Court has appointed itself as ‘national decision maker on environmental policy,’ writes Justice Kagan

Supreme Court has appointed itself as ‘national decision maker on environmental policy,’ writes Justice Kagan

The New York Times reports: The Supreme Court on Thursday curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to police millions of acres of wetlands, delivering another setback to the agency’s ability to combat pollution. Writing for five justices, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the Clean Water Act does not allow the agency to regulate discharges into wetlands near bodies of water unless they have “a continuous surface connection” to those waters. The decision was a second major blow to…

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Trump workers moved Mar-a-Lago boxes a day before Justice Dept. came for documents

Trump workers moved Mar-a-Lago boxes a day before Justice Dept. came for documents

The Washington Post reports: Two of Donald Trump’s employees moved boxes of papers the day before FBI agents and a prosecutor visited the former president’s Florida home to retrieve classified documents in response to a subpoena — timing that investigators have come to view as suspicious and an indication of possible obstruction, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump and his aides also allegedly carried out a “dress rehearsal” for moving sensitive papers even before his office received the…

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DeSantis’s launch wasn’t the only thing that crashed

DeSantis’s launch wasn’t the only thing that crashed

David Frum writes: In the aftermath of the debacle, declaring a presidential run in a Twitter chat may appear to have been a miscalculation. Yet it started as a calculation entirely in keeping with DeSantis’s style of campaigning. DeSantis’s ads raise barriers between the candidate and the voters. In his first one, voters again and again encounter the candidate via a screen: They see him on TV, on their phone. In the one scene in which the candidate is inserted among…

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Casey DeSantis is ‘the power behind the throne’

Casey DeSantis is ‘the power behind the throne’

Michael Kruse writes: A telegenic former television personality, a breast cancer survivor and a mother of three young kids, Casey, 42, has a sort of policy portfolio of her own that ranges from hurricane recovery to issues of mental health. In the DeSantis political project, she is unusually important and uncommonly involved, according to hundreds of interviews over the last few years and more than 60 more over the last few weeks — an array of former staffers, current supporters…

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The media has got Ron DeSantis nailed

The media has got Ron DeSantis nailed

Jack Shafer writes: Noting both his rigid demeanor and his deliberate avoidance of the nonpartisan press, the reporters covering DeSantis have gathered these behavioral cues to sew the candidate a straitjacketed image, portraying him as a locked up, frozen and vengeful character whose veins pump bile, not blood. He’s now in a box — likely for his entire 2024 campaign — that will be difficult to break out of, even for the most talented escape artist. Like many press portraits,…

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Russia’s ‘invincible’ hypersonic missiles prove anything but, as Ukraine utilizes U.S. Patriot defenses

Russia’s ‘invincible’ hypersonic missiles prove anything but, as Ukraine utilizes U.S. Patriot defenses

Michael Weiss and James Rushton report: It was meant to be the Russian “wonder weapon,” but it turned out to be just another example of Vladimir Putin’s military over-promising and under-delivering. The Kh-47M2 “Kinzhal” — which means “dagger” in Russian — was billed as a state-of-the-art hypersonic missile, “invincible,” in Putin’s words, to Western air defenses. For the early months of Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine, it seemed to be just that. The missile had been used in the first…

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