When did humans first occupy the Americas? Ask the sloth bones

When did humans first occupy the Americas? Ask the sloth bones

The New York Times reports: Of all the long-running disputes in archaeology, few roil scholars more than the question of when humans arrived in the Americas. For much of the past century, the reigning theory was that in or around 11,500 years ago big-game hunters from Asia trudged to North America across a land bridge spanning the Bering Strait, hung a right through a corridor between glaciers and, in less than a millennium, reached the tip of South America. Over…

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How college towns across America are decimating the GOP

How college towns across America are decimating the GOP

Politico reports: Spring elections in Wisconsin are typically low turnout affairs, but in April, with the nation watching the state’s bitterly contested Supreme Court race, voters turned out in record-breaking numbers. No place was more energized to vote than Dane County, the state’s second-most populous county after Milwaukee. It’s long been a progressive stronghold thanks to the double influence of Madison, the state capital, and the University of Wisconsin, but this was something else. Turnout in Dane was higher than…

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Fulton county prosecutors prepare racketeering charges in Trump inquiry

Fulton county prosecutors prepare racketeering charges in Trump inquiry

The Guardian reports: The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia has developed evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month, according to two people briefed on the matter. The racketeering statute in Georgia requires prosecutors to show the existence of an “enterprise” – and a pattern of racketeering activity that is predicated on at least two “qualifying” crimes. In the Trump investigation, the Fulton county district…

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Texas’s governor put a barrier in the Rio Grande. DOJ just hit back

Texas’s governor put a barrier in the Rio Grande. DOJ just hit back

Greg Sargent writes: One of the more pernicious developments in our politics is the effort by red-state governors to assert outsize power over immigration in their states, in ways designed to appeal to national right-wing audiences. For instance, the state of Texas recently placed a large barrier in the Rio Grande, supposedly to keep migrants out, but actually just to send a message to Fox News viewers that the state is securing the border where President Biden allegedly refused. But…

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Rogue state: Alabama Republicans refuse to draw a second Black congressional district in defiance of Supreme Court

Rogue state: Alabama Republicans refuse to draw a second Black congressional district in defiance of Supreme Court

NBC News reports: Alabama Republicans on Friday defied a U.S. Supreme Court order by passing a new congressional map that includes only one majority-Black district. The GOP-controlled Legislature had called a special session to redraw an earlier map after the Supreme Court reaffirmed a federal court order to include two districts where Black voters make up voting-age majorities, “or something quite close to it.” But on Friday, state Republicans approved a new map with just one majority-Black seat and a…

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Ukraine begins firing U.S.-provided cluster munitions at Russian forces

Ukraine begins firing U.S.-provided cluster munitions at Russian forces

The Washington Post reports: Ukraine has begun firing U.S.-provided cluster munitions against Russian forces in southeastern Ukraine in a push to break up well-fortified Russian positions that have slowed Ukraine’s summer offensive, according to Ukrainian officials familiar with the matter. The munitions debuted as Russian missiles pummeled the country’s Black Sea port region of Odessa for the third night in a row, while an attack on the nearby port city of Mykolaiv left 19 people wounded, including five children. The…

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Reflecting on extinction

Reflecting on extinction

Terry Tempest Williams writes: On the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, I am thinking about extinction and what that means for a creature, a living being, to vanish from existence. Say their names: great auk, passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, Steller’s sea cow, Caribbean monk seal, Great Plains wolf, Puerto Rican long-nosed bat, Maryland darter, Utah lake sculpin, Labrador duck, heath hen, Bachman’s warbler, Xerces blue butterfly, Wyoming toad, and Panamanian golden frog—all extinct beginning in the 1800s to…

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Bankman-Fried planned to buy island state of Nauru and build apocalypse bunker

Bankman-Fried planned to buy island state of Nauru and build apocalypse bunker

The Guardian reports: The disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded the FTX exchange, had planned to purchase the small Pacific island nation of Nauru in case the world came to an end, according to a new lawsuit. The lawsuit, filed on Thursday by FTX against its 31-year-old founder and three other former executives, and seeking $1bn, included a memo created by Bankman-Fried’s younger brother Gabriel and an FTX Foundation executive. The memo detailed plans to buy Nauru. The plan…

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Tipping points: Climate collapse could happen fast

Tipping points: Climate collapse could happen fast

Lois Parshley writes: Ever since some of the earliest projections of climate change were made back in the 1970s, they have been remarkably accurate at predicting the rate at which global temperatures would rise. For decades, climate change has proceeded at roughly the expected pace, says David Armstrong McKay, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter, in England. Its impacts, however, are accelerating—sometimes far faster than expected. For a while, the consequences weren’t easily seen. They certainly are today….

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Florida schools will teach how slavery brought ‘personal benefit’ to black people

Florida schools will teach how slavery brought ‘personal benefit’ to black people

The Daily Beast reports: Middle school students in Florida will soon be taught that slavery gave Black people a “personal benefit” because they “developed skills.” After the Florida Board of Education approved new standards for African American history on Wednesday, high school students will be taught an equally distorted message: that a deadly white mob attack against Black residents of Ocoee, Florida, in 1920 included “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.” Dozens of Black residents were killed…

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Influential activist Leonard Leo helped fund media campaign lionizing Clarence Thomas

Influential activist Leonard Leo helped fund media campaign lionizing Clarence Thomas

The Washington Post reports: The 25th anniversary of Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the Supreme Court was approaching — a moment that would draw attention to his accomplishments on the bench but also to the misconduct claims that had nearly derailed his rise. Among the wave of retrospective accounts set to come out that year, 2016, was a star-studded HBO film dramatically recounting Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations. That spring, a flurry of opinion articles defending Thomas and railing against the…

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As RFK Jr. gets boosted by the GOP, his popularity among Democrats plummets

As RFK Jr. gets boosted by the GOP, his popularity among Democrats plummets

Aaron Blake writes: The right’s thinly veiled campaign to elevate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for its own political purposes culminated Thursday with his invitation to testify at a congressional hearing. It was a remarkable scene: a Democratic presidential candidate, who just last week suggested that the coronavirus could have been a “deliberately targeted” bioweapon to spare Chinese and Ashkenazi Jewish people while attacking White and Black people disproportionately, and who has regularly espoused debunked vaccine claims, welcomed by Republicans to…

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Russia’s spies say Putin faces more coups

Russia’s spies say Putin faces more coups

Michael Weiss reports: For Russian spies and soldiers, the biggest shock from last month’s abortive coup in Russia is that Yevegeny Prigozhin didn’t succeed in overthrowing a regime that they say curries little devotion. The Insider has spoken with several sources in Russia’s special services. Prigozhin, the rogue catering magnate turned mercenary financier, they insist, faced little resistance because he enjoys widespread support within the ranks of the very institutions meant to safeguard the state and Vladimir Putin. To most…

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Iran’s hijab-industrial complex

Iran’s hijab-industrial complex

Kourosh Ziabari writes: The Iranian government is handicapped by unrelenting sanctions that do not look as though they are going away anytime soon. The country’s economic paralysis is compounded by the inadequacies of a squad of callow officials and corrupt functionaries, whose nepotism triggers frequent scandals these days. While the sanctions have almost irreversibly insulated the national economy from the outside world and rendered Iran’s banking and financial sectors irrelevant, the iron-fisted establishment has been unable to tame its top-tier…

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