FBI attacker was prolific contributor to Trump’s Truth Social website

FBI attacker was prolific contributor to Trump’s Truth Social website

The Washington Post reports: In the minutes after an armed man in body armor tried to breach an FBI field office in Cincinnati, an account with the suspect’s name, Ricky Shiffer, posted to former president Donald Trump’s social network, Truth Social: “If you don’t hear from me, it is true I tried attacking the F.B.I.” The Shiffer account appeared to be one of Truth Social’s most prolific posters, writing 374 messages there in the past eight days — mostly to…

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Arctic warming is happening faster than previously described, analysis shows

Arctic warming is happening faster than previously described, analysis shows

The New York Times reports: The rapid warming of the Arctic, a definitive sign of climate change, is occurring even faster than previously described, researchers in Finland said Thursday. Over the past four decades the region has been heating up four times faster than the global average, not the two to three times that has commonly been reported. And some parts of the region, notably the Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia, are warming up to seven times faster,…

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Democrats finally jettison carbon pricing in favor of tax incentives to counter climate change

Democrats finally jettison carbon pricing in favor of tax incentives to counter climate change

Inside Climate News reports: The nation’s first comprehensive climate law, expected to be sealed with a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday, will not look anything like the program imagined by either climate economists or those in Washington and the environmental movement who had faith in bipartisan action. From the time that the world first agreed to act on climate change 30 years ago at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, environmentalists talked about putting a…

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The fervent debate over the best way to confront climate change

The fervent debate over the best way to confront climate change

By Madeline Ostrander, August 12, 2022 In the late 1950s, Ian Burton, then a geographer at the University of Chicago, learned about a troubling conundrum with levees. These expensive and engineering-intensive strategies — which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers favored for reining in floods along big river floodplains — worked well for holding back intermediate amounts of water. But they gave people a false sense of safety. After a levee went up, sometimes more people actually built and moved…

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No music training? No problem: Even novices intuit complex music theory

No music training? No problem: Even novices intuit complex music theory

Science reports: Your co-worker’s annoying humming may be more virtuosic than you think. People without musical training naturally improvise melodies that have hallmarks of tunes composed by professionals, a new study shows. It seems that most individuals follow the arcane rules of music composition, even those who are unaware those rules exist. “It’s cool,” says Samuel Mehr, an expert on the psychology of music at Yale University who was not involved in the work. The study offers an “elegant” way…

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How the Trump-FBI feud puts swing-state Republicans in a bind

How the Trump-FBI feud puts swing-state Republicans in a bind

Politico reports: As news broke that the FBI had searched Donald Trump’s Florida home, MAGA loyalists and even some of the former president’s potential 2024 rivals rushed to a full-throated defense of the former president. But not every Republican joined the chorus. While the FBI search has given a jolt of energy to the conservative base, the issue is proving to be more complicated in pivotal battleground races that could determine control of the chamber — places where Republicans had…

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Trump’s new lawyer views his new client as a ‘racist’

Trump’s new lawyer views his new client as a ‘racist’

The New York Times reports: Amid a deepening swirl of federal and state investigations, former President Donald J. Trump has hired a high-powered Atlanta lawyer to represent him in an inquiry into election interference in Georgia. The lawyer, Drew Findling, has represented an array of rap stars including Cardi B, Gucci Mane and Migos, and is known by the hashtag #BillionDollarLawyer. But he has not been a fan of Mr. Trump; in one 2018 post on Twitter, after Mr. Trump…

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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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