With feds circling, Trump asks allies: Who’s ‘wearing a wire’?

With feds circling, Trump asks allies: Who’s ‘wearing a wire’?

Rolling Stone reports: Donald Trump is worried he may have a rat — or multiple rats — in his midst. He’s wondering if his phones are tapped, or even if one of his buddies could be “wearing a wire.” As the federal and state investigations into Trump and his orbit swell, so have the former president’s suspicions, according to two sources familiar with the matter and another two people close to the twice-impeached former Oval Office occupant. This summer, Trump…

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Biden met with historians who warned him about threats to democracy

Biden met with historians who warned him about threats to democracy

Insider reports: President Joe Biden privately met with a group of historians at the White House last week who warned him about ongoing threats to democracy, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. Sources familiar with the August 4 meeting, which was said to have lasted nearly two hours, told the outlet the experts described the current moment as among the most dangerous to democracy in modern history. The people in the meeting were said to have included the Princeton University history…

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Influencers are whitewashing Syria’s regime, with help from sponsors

Influencers are whitewashing Syria’s regime, with help from sponsors

Sophie Fullerton writes: Last November, around the same time the Irish travel vlogger Janet Newenham was filming videos of her strolls through Damascus and Aleppo, five members of a family, including three children, were killed in a Russian airstrike in northwest Syria. But none of Newenham’s 170,000 YouTube subscribers would have learned that from her upbeat dispatches — in her videos, Syria is not a country at war. After a scorched-earth war — supported by Iranian forces, sectarian militias and…

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Why humans have more voice control than any other primates

Why humans have more voice control than any other primates

Science News reports: A crying baby, a screaming adult, a teenager whose voice cracks — people could have sounded this shrill all the time, a new study suggests, if not for a crucial step in human evolution. It’s what we’re missing that makes the difference. Humans have vocal cords, muscles in our larynx, or voice box, that vibrate to produce sound. But unlike all other studied primates, humans don’t have small bits of tissue above the vocal cords called vocal…

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This animal’s behavior is mechanically programmed

This animal’s behavior is mechanically programmed

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: The biophysicist Manu Prakash vividly remembers the moment, late one night in a colleague’s laboratory a dozen years ago, when he peered into a microscope and met his new obsession. The animal beneath the lenses wasn’t much to look at, resembling an amoeba more than anything else: a flattened multicellular blob, only 20 microns thick and a few millimeters across, with neither head nor tail. It moved on thousands of cilia that blanketed its underside to form…

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Why the Trump search warrant is nothing like Hillary’s emails

Why the Trump search warrant is nothing like Hillary’s emails

Politico reports: The Justice Department official who oversaw the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified records says there’s simply no comparing the search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence to the case against the former secretary of State. “People sling these cases around to suit their political agenda but every case has to stand on its own circumstances,” said David Laufman, who led the Justice Department’s counterintelligence section until 2018 and is now a partner at the firm Wiggin and…

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An informer told the FBI what docs Trump was hiding, and where

An informer told the FBI what docs Trump was hiding, and where

William M Arkin reports: The raid on Mar-a-Lago was based largely on information from an FBI confidential human source, one who was able to identify what classified documents former President Trump was still hiding and even the location of those documents, two senior government officials told Newsweek. The officials, who have direct knowledge of the FBI’s deliberations and were granted anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters, said the raid of Donald Trump’s Florida residence was deliberately timed to occur…

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Ukraine’s long-awaited southern counteroffensive begins with a bang in Crimea

Ukraine’s long-awaited southern counteroffensive begins with a bang in Crimea

Politico reports: Blasts that rocked a Russian military airfield in forcibly annexed Crimea signal the start of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the south and a critical new phase of the war that could shape its ultimate outcome, two Ukrainian officials told POLITICO. The series of explosions Tuesday sent huge fireballs and mushroom clouds of black smoke into the sky, scattering terrified Russian vacationers who were seen in videos shared on social media scrambling for safety on a beach and fleeing by…

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Europe on course to suffer worst drought in 500 years

Europe on course to suffer worst drought in 500 years

The Daily Mail reports: Germany’s most-important river is running dry as Europe suffers through a drought that is on course to become its worst in 500 years, with terrifying wildfires burning once again in France. Water levels in the Rhine – which carries 80 per cent of all goods transported by water in Germany, from its industrial heartlands to Dutch ports – are now so low that it could become impassable to barges later this week, threatening vital supplies of…

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Carbon-reduction plans rely on technology that doesn’t exist

Carbon-reduction plans rely on technology that doesn’t exist

Naomi Oreskes writes: At last year’s Glasgow COP26 meetings on the climate crisis, U.S. envoy and former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry stated that solutions to the climate crisis will involve “technologies that we don’t yet have” but are supposedly on the way. Kerry’s optimism comes directly from scientists. You can read about these beliefs in the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Integrated Assessment Models, created by researchers. These models present pathways to carbon reductions that may…

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Israel and Gaza keep up their precarious dance

Israel and Gaza keep up their precarious dance

Neri Zilber reports: One week before the latest round of fighting over the weekend between Israel and the Gaza-based militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a senior Israeli security official had some prescient words. Unlike Hamas, which is the bigger and stronger group that actually rules Gaza, the PIJ “was an outlier … with no governing responsibility, which would require special treatment” if it chose to escalate, he told me. That “special treatment” came in the form of a three-day…

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How the physics of nothing underlies everything

How the physics of nothing underlies everything

Charlie Wood writes: Millennia ago, Aristotle asserted that nature abhors a vacuum, reasoning that objects would fly through truly empty space at impossible speeds. In 1277, the French bishop Etienne Tempier shot back, declaring that God could do anything, even create a vacuum. Then a mere scientist pulled it off. Otto von Guericke invented a pump to suck the air from within a hollow copper sphere, establishing perhaps the first high-quality vacuum on Earth. In a theatrical demonstration in 1654,…

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What the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago could mean for Trump

What the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago could mean for Trump

Isaac Chotiner writes: On Monday, F.B.I. agents searched the Florida home of former President Donald Trump, possibly commencing a new phase in the legal scrutiny that he has faced since leaving office. According to the Times, the search concerned classified material that Trump removed from the White House and took to Mar-a-Lago. What remains unclear is whether they found any information related to attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election. To understand…

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China’s Taiwan aggression has backfired in Tokyo

China’s Taiwan aggression has backfired in Tokyo

William Sposato writes: China’s four days of military exercises encircling Taiwan in response to a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week has clear ramifications for Japan. The show of military muscle just 70 miles from Japanese territory and the firing of ballistic missiles into waters controlled by Japan were clearly meant as a warning that the country risks being dragged into any future conflict in the region. While China’s motives in indirectly targeting Japan are not known,…

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