Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice says America needs another bloody revolution

Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice says America needs another bloody revolution

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports: Former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman told a group of Republicans this month that a revolution against government officials over the 2020 election has become necessary but said people have become too comfortable to water the “tree of liberty” with blood. “For the first time in my life I am beginning to wonder if America’s best days are behind us,” Gableman said Sept. 9 at a dinner hosted by the Republican Party of Outagamie County,…

Read More Read More

Erdoğan to Putin: Return Crimea to ‘rightful owners’

Erdoğan to Putin: Return Crimea to ‘rightful owners’

Politico reports: Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that Russian President Vladimir Putin must return all land that Russia has occupied, including Crimea. The Black Sea peninsula should be returned to its “rightful owners,” Erdoğan told PBS NewsHour on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, in comments likely to provoke ire in Moscow. Asked whether Russia should be allowed to keep Crimea in a negotiated end to the war, Erdoğan said, “These are our descendants…

Read More Read More

Climate change threatens up to 100% of trees in Australian cities, and most urban species worldwide

Climate change threatens up to 100% of trees in Australian cities, and most urban species worldwide

Photo: Jaana Dielenberg, Author provided By Manuel Esperon-Rodriguez, Western Sydney University; Jaana Dielenberg, Charles Darwin University; Jonathan Lenoir, Université de Picardie Jules Verne (UPJV); Mark G Tjoelker, Western Sydney University, and Rachael Gallagher, Western Sydney University To anyone who has stepped off a hot pavement into a shady park, it will come as little surprise that trees (and shrubs) have a big cooling effect on cities. Our study published today in Nature Climate Change found climate change will put 90-100%…

Read More Read More

On Earth, ants outnumber humans by about 2.5 million to one

On Earth, ants outnumber humans by about 2.5 million to one

The Washington Post reports: It’s the ants’ world, and we’re just visiting. A new estimate for the total number of ants burrowing and buzzing on Earth comes to a whopping total of nearly 20 quadrillion individuals. That staggering sum — 20,000,000,000,000,000, or 20,000 trillion — reveals ants’ astonishing ubiquity even as scientists grow concerned a possible mass die off of insects could upend ecosystems. In a paper released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group…

Read More Read More

Vikings may not have been blonde, or Scandinavian

Vikings may not have been blonde, or Scandinavian

Live Science reports: Those ferocious seafaring warriors that explored, raided and traded across Europe from the late eighth to the early 11th centuries, known as the Vikings, are typically thought of as blonde Scandinavians. But Vikings may have a more diverse history: They carried genes from Southern Europe and Asia, a new study suggests. “We didn’t know genetically what they actually looked like until now,” senior author Eske Willerslev, a fellow of St. John’s College of the University of Cambridge,…

Read More Read More

Putin’s new Ukraine problem: Even the war’s biggest supporters are growing dissatisfied

Putin’s new Ukraine problem: Even the war’s biggest supporters are growing dissatisfied

NBC News reports: Russian President Vladimir Putin has a problem. For more than two decades now, Putin’s expanding grip on power has been predicated on his portrayed strength and justified as essential to Russia’s existence. Over time, as the political opposition and the independent media were gradually whittled away, Kremlin propagandists fostered a sense of inevitability underpinning his continued stewardship. “Russian society, just as the Russian army, is decaying and falling apart because of corruption.” From the start, Putin’s invasion…

Read More Read More

Ken Burns: ‘We’re in perhaps the most difficult crisis in the history of America’

Ken Burns: ‘We’re in perhaps the most difficult crisis in the history of America’

David Smith writes: Over six hours, [Ken Burns’ new docuseries, The US and the Holocaust] examines America’s flawed response to the Nazis’ persecution and mass murder of Jews, asking what could have been done differently to halt the genocide. Voice actors include Liam Neeson, Matthew Rhys, Paul Giamatti, Meryl Streep, Werner Herzog, Joe Morton and Hope Davis. It may be Burns’s most didactic film yet as it ends provocatively with images of Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine African…

Read More Read More

Massachusetts seeks human trafficking probe targeting Florida Gov. DeSantis over asylum seekers

Massachusetts seeks human trafficking probe targeting Florida Gov. DeSantis over asylum seekers

Judd Legum reports: Popular Information has obtained documentary evidence that migrants from Venezuela were provided with false information to convince them to board flights chartered by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R). The documents suggest that the flights were not just a callous political stunt but potentially a crime. Last Wednesday, two planes landed in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and dropped off about 50 migrants from Venezuela. DeSantis quickly took credit. The migrants were used as political pawns in the hopes of…

Read More Read More

How Russian trolls helped keep the Women’s March out of lock step

How Russian trolls helped keep the Women’s March out of lock step

Ellen Barry reports: Linda Sarsour awoke on Jan. 23, 2017, logged onto the internet, and felt sick. The weekend before, she had stood in Washington at the head of the Women’s March, a mobilization against President Donald J. Trump that surpassed all expectations. Crowds had begun forming before dawn, and by the time she climbed up onto the stage, they extended farther than the eye could see. More than four million people around the United States had taken part, experts…

Read More Read More

Proud Boys memo reveals meticulous planning for ‘street-level violence’

Proud Boys memo reveals meticulous planning for ‘street-level violence’

The Guardian reports: The document is so dowdy and formal it resembles the annual minutes of a society of tax accountants. Its index lists sections on “objectives” and “rules of engagement” and carries an “addendum” that provides recommendations for hotels and parking. On the cover, two words give a clue to the notoriety of the group that produced it: “MAGA” and “WARNING”. That and the date: 5 January 2021, the day before the US Capitol attack. What goes unsaid on…

Read More Read More

Congress is running out of time to prevent Trump, if re-elected, gaining the power to fire key federal workers

Congress is running out of time to prevent Trump, if re-elected, gaining the power to fire key federal workers

The Daily Beast reports: In the final days of his presidency, Donald Trump quietly attempted what might have been his most brazen play yet to reshape the federal government in his image: He issued an executive order giving him the power to fire essentially any civil servant at will. That attempt was thwarted by the election of Joe Biden. But in laying out a 2024 presidential bid and a White House comeback, Trump has vowed to enact that order again…

Read More Read More

How parasites manipulate the behavior of their hosts

How parasites manipulate the behavior of their hosts

Laith Al-Shawaf writes: What if some outside force could control your mind and make you act against your own interests? It’s a terrifying prospect—one that captures our imagination and recurs frequently in our fiction. It’s the goal of one of the three Unforgivable Curses in Harry Potter. It’s the purpose of Newspeak, the fictional language in George Orwell’s 1984. It enthralls in classics such as Brave New World and The Manchurian Candidate. In the 1950s, the CIA was so concerned…

Read More Read More

Trump’s embrace of QAnon is becoming increasingly explicit

Trump’s embrace of QAnon is becoming increasingly explicit

The New York Times reports: Former President Donald J. Trump appeared to more fully embrace QAnon on Saturday, playing a song at a political rally in Ohio that prompted attendees to respond with a salute in reference to the cultlike conspiracy theory’s theme song. While speaking in Youngstown in support of J.D. Vance, whom he has endorsed as Ohio’s Republican nominee for the Senate, Mr. Trump delivered a dark address about the decline of America over music that was all…

Read More Read More

As Trump inquiry heats up, AG Garland says divisions imperil the rule of law

As Trump inquiry heats up, AG Garland says divisions imperil the rule of law

The New York Times reports: An emotional Attorney General Merrick B. Garland addressed new citizens on Saturday at Ellis Island, the site of his family’s American origin story, and warned that the country had become dangerously divided by political factionalism, which has imperiled the democracy and the rule of law. Mr. Garland was presiding over the oath of allegiance for 250 naturalized citizens at the iconic immigration processing center, on the anniversary of the signing of the Constitution in 1787….

Read More Read More