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Representation for taxpayers: New York moves to allow 800,000 legal permanent residents to vote in local elections

Representation for taxpayers: New York moves to allow 800,000 legal permanent residents to vote in local elections

The New York Times reports: New York City lawmakers are poised to allow more than 800,000 New Yorkers who are green card holders or have the legal right to work in the United States to vote in municipal elections and for local ballot initiatives. The bill, known as “Our City, Our Vote,” would make New York City the largest municipality in the country to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. The legislation, expected to be approved by the City…

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Pesticides harmful to bees in worse ways than previously thought

Pesticides harmful to bees in worse ways than previously thought

Science reports: Honey bees have a reputation for working hard, but carpenter bees and other bee species that don’t live in colonies might be even more industrious. For these so-called solitary bees, there is no dedicated worker class to help with rearing young and foraging. “Each female is kind of like a lone wolf,” says Clara Stuligross, a Ph.D. student at the University of California (UC), Davis. Now, a study by Stuligross and colleagues tallying the detrimental impacts of a…

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Humans didn’t invent mathematics — it’s what the world is made of

Humans didn’t invent mathematics — it’s what the world is made of

Geralt / Pixabay By Sam Baron, Australian Catholic University Many people think that mathematics is a human invention. To this way of thinking, mathematics is like a language: it may describe real things in the world, but it doesn’t “exist” outside the minds of the people who use it. But the Pythagorean school of thought in ancient Greece held a different view. Its proponents believed reality is fundamentally mathematical. More than 2,000 years later, philosophers and physicists are starting to…

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At the dawn of life, heat may have driven cell division

At the dawn of life, heat may have driven cell division

Carrie Arnold writes: An elegant ballet of proteins enables modern cells to replicate themselves. During cell division, structural proteins and enzymes coordinate the duplication of DNA, the division of a cell’s cytoplasmic contents, and the cinching of the membrane that cleaves the cell. Getting these processes right is crucial because errors can lead to daughter cells that are abnormal or unviable. Billions of years ago, the same challenge must have faced the first self-organizing membranous bundles of chemicals arising spontaneously…

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U.S. added to list of ‘backsliding’ democracies for first time

U.S. added to list of ‘backsliding’ democracies for first time

The Guardian reports: The US has been added to an annual list of “backsliding” democracies for the first time, the International IDEA thinktank has said, pointing to a “visible deterioration” it said began in 2019. Globally, more than one in four people live in a backsliding democracy, a proportion that rises to more than two in three with the addition of authoritarian or “hybrid” regimes, according to the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. “This year we coded…

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Al Gore ‘was a man’ about his election loss, unlike Trump, federal judge says

Al Gore ‘was a man’ about his election loss, unlike Trump, federal judge says

CNN reports: A federal judge took aim at former President Donald Trump on Monday for lying about voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election, saying that former Vice President Al Gore had a better standing to challenge the 2000 election results but that he was “a man” and walked away. “Al Gore had a better case to argue than Mr. Trump, but he was a man about what happened to him,” Senior District Judge Reggie Walton said of Gore’s decision…

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The QAnon JFK cult in Dallas is tearing families apart

The QAnon JFK cult in Dallas is tearing families apart

Vice News reports: Katy Garner and her sister grew up in a small town in Arkansas and were always close. “We both were cheerleaders in school, made pretty good grades, and loved to just hang out with friends and each other. No one has a perfect childhood, but we had each other. We knew that. And that’s what made us so close. We even have matching tattoos to remind each other of that,” Garner told VICE News. They both became…

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U.S. considering sending extra weaponry to Ukraine as fears mount over potential Russian invasion

U.S. considering sending extra weaponry to Ukraine as fears mount over potential Russian invasion

CNN reports: The Biden administration is weighing sending military advisers and new equipment including weaponry to Ukraine as Russia builds up forces near the border and US officials prepare allies for the possibility of another Russian invasion, multiple sources familiar with the deliberations tell CNN. The discussions about the proposed lethal aid package are happening as Ukraine has begun to warn publicly that an invasion could happen as soon as January. The package could include new Javelin anti-tank and anti-armor…

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A ‘universal’ flu vaccine could bring one of the world’s longest pandemics to an end

A ‘universal’ flu vaccine could bring one of the world’s longest pandemics to an end

Matthew Hutson writes: In 2009, global health officials started tracking a new kind of flu. It appeared first in Mexico, in March, and quickly infected thousands. Influenza tends to kill the very young and the very old, but this flu was different. It seemed to be severely affecting otherwise healthy young adults. American epidemiologists soon learned of cases in California, Texas, and Kansas. By the end of April, the virus had reached a high school in Queens, where a few…

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Canada’s tar sands: Destruction so vast and deep it challenges the existence of land and people

Canada’s tar sands: Destruction so vast and deep it challenges the existence of land and people

Inside Climate News reports: The first mine opened when Jean L’Hommecourt was a young girl, an open pit where an oil company had begun digging in the sandy soil for a black, viscous form of crude called bitumen. She and her family would pass the mine in their boat when they traveled up the Athabasca River, and the fumes from its processing plant would sting their eyes and burn their throats, despite the wet cloths their mother would drape over…

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Junk food is bad for plants, too

Junk food is bad for plants, too

Anne Biklé and David R. Montgomery write: Most of us are familiar with the much-maligned Western diet and its mainstay of processed food products found in the middle aisles of the grocery store. Some of us beeline for the salty chips and others for the sugar-packed cereals. But we are not the only ones eating junk food. An awful lot of crops grown in the developed world eat a botanical version of this diet—main courses of conventional fertilizers with pesticide…

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Climate denial is waning on the right. What’s replacing it might be just as scary

Climate denial is waning on the right. What’s replacing it might be just as scary

The Guardian reports: Standing in front of the partial ruins of Rome’s Colosseum, Boris Johnson explained that a motive to tackle the climate crisis could be found in the fall of the Roman empire. Then, as now, he argued, the collapse of civilization hinged on the weakness of its borders. “When the Roman empire fell, it was largely as a result of uncontrolled immigration – the empire could no longer control its borders, people came in from the east and…

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How the U.S. lost ground to China in the contest for clean energy

How the U.S. lost ground to China in the contest for clean energy

The New York Times reports: Tom Perriello saw it coming but could do nothing to stop it. André Kapanga too. Despite urgent emails, phone calls and personal pleas, they watched helplessly as a company backed by the Chinese government took ownership from the Americans of one of the world’s largest cobalt mines. It was 2016, and a deal had been struck by the Arizona-based mining giant Freeport-McMoRan to sell the site, located in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which now…

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GOP donors back Manchin and Sinema as they reshape Biden’s agenda

GOP donors back Manchin and Sinema as they reshape Biden’s agenda

The New York Times reports: Over the summer, as he was working to scale back President Biden’s domestic agenda, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia traveled to an $18 million mansion in Dallas for a fund-raiser that attracted Republican and corporate donors who have cheered on his efforts. In September, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who along with Mr. Manchin has been a major impediment to the White House’s efforts to pass its package of social and climate policy,…

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