Earth’s first continents may have appeared three-quarters of a billion years earlier than previously thought

Earth’s first continents may have appeared three-quarters of a billion years earlier than previously thought

Inside Science reports: Earth’s first continents may have emerged from the oceans roughly 750 million years earlier than previously thought, rising from the seas in a manner completely unlike modern continents. These early masses of solid rock may have floated buoyantly atop magma welling up from below, a new study finds. Unlike any other known planet, Earth possesses both continents and oceans on its surface. The emergence of land from sea greatly influenced Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, climate and proliferation of…

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Why white voters with racist views often still support Black Republicans

Why white voters with racist views often still support Black Republicans

Hakeem Jefferson and Michael Tesler write: Can white voters who back a Black candidate still hold racist beliefs and views? That question has come to the fore in the wake of Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial victory in the blueish state of Virginia. Conservatives were quick to counter claims that Youngkin’s win represented the effectiveness of stoking racial fears with results from Virginia’s down-ballot election for lieutenant governor — a contest where the Republican candidate, Winsome Sears, made history by becoming the…

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Swift ruling tests Trump’s tactic of running out the clock

Swift ruling tests Trump’s tactic of running out the clock

Charlie Savage writes: On the surface, a judge’s ruling on Tuesday night that Congress can obtain Trump White House files related to the Jan. 6 riot seemed to echo another high-profile ruling in November 2019. In the earlier matter, a judge said a former White House counsel must testify about then-President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia investigation. In both cases, Democratic-controlled House oversight committees issued subpoenas, Mr. Trump sought to stonewall those efforts by invoking constitutional secrecy…

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Domestic extremists pushing violence against Congress, school and health officials, DHS bulletin says

Domestic extremists pushing violence against Congress, school and health officials, DHS bulletin says

NBC News reports: Domestic extremists continue to exploit false narratives to promote violence online, calling for attacks on members of Congress, public health and school officials, even as they share information about how to build bombs, according to a new intelligence bulletin by the Department of Homeland Security that paints a picture of persistent danger. The new National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin is expected to be released Wednesday afternoon, according to officials familiar with it. It replaces an existing bulletin…

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GOP recruitment struggles give Democrats hope in 2022 Senate fight

GOP recruitment struggles give Democrats hope in 2022 Senate fight

NBC News reports: They lost the governor’s race in Virginia. They had a bad scare in New Jersey. They’re the clear underdogs in the battle for the U.S. House. But Democrats saw glimmers of hope in the fight for the Senate on Tuesday when a top Republican prospect decided not to run. In New Hampshire, popular Republican Gov. Chris Sununu shocked party leaders when he announced that he wouldn’t launch a bid for a Democratic-held seat, preferring instead to seek…

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Migrants face ‘desperate situation’ at Poland-Belarus border

Migrants face ‘desperate situation’ at Poland-Belarus border

The Guardian reports: For two days the same looped recording has been blaring out from speakers on the Polish border: “Attention! Attention! Crossing the Polish border is legal only at border crossings.” The ominous warning is directed at the thousands of asylum seekers massed in Belarus on the opposite side of the barbed wire running between the two countries. According to Poland, Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, is deliberately provoking a new refugee crisis in Europe by organising the movement of…

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Will China really invade Taiwan?

Will China really invade Taiwan?

Fred Kaplan writes: In March, Adm. Philip Davidson, the outgoing commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific, told a Senate panel that China posed a “manifest” threat of invading Taiwan “in the next six years.” No senior official had ever issued such a specific or urgent warning about the fate of the tiny democratic island 100 miles off of China’s eastern coast. But since Davidson’s testimony, boatloads of military officers, active and retired, have sounded similar alarm bells. Some…

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Few willing to change lifestyle to save the planet, climate survey finds

Few willing to change lifestyle to save the planet, climate survey finds

The Guardian reports: Citizens are alarmed by the climate crisis, but most believe they are already doing more to preserve the planet than anyone else, including their government, and few are willing to make significant lifestyle changes, an international survey has found. “The widespread awareness of the importance of the climate crisis illustrated in this study has yet to be coupled with a proportionate willingness to act,” the survey of 10 countries including the US, UK, France and Germany, observed….

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Nations most impacted by global warming kept out of key climate meetings in Glasgow

Nations most impacted by global warming kept out of key climate meetings in Glasgow

Inside Climate News reports: Discontent about lack of progress on climate financing for vulnerable countries spilled into the second week of climate negotiations in Glasgow during Monday’s opening session of COP26, when representatives of all 197 countries at the United Nations Climate talks had a chance to directly address conference president Alok Sharma. How to financially aid developing countries that hold almost no historical responsibility for global warming but are most vulnerable to its intensifying impacts has been a thorny…

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Trust is hard to find at the UN climate summit in Glasgow

Trust is hard to find at the UN climate summit in Glasgow

Bill McKibben writes: As the second week of the COP26 United Nations global climate talks began in Glasgow on Monday, the Washington Post published a truly remarkable piece of reporting that will surely demoralize the hardworking people gathered in the convention hall trying to hammer out an agreement. A team led by the Post’s veteran climate analyst Chris Mooney went through the emissions data proffered by countries at the summit, and found that they were in many cases wildly wrong….

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Should we rein cities in or embrace their biomorphic growth?

Should we rein cities in or embrace their biomorphic growth?

Josh Berson writes: Cities are hard on the body. We are all familiar now with how dense living facilitates the spread of airborne disease. But the stressors of urban life are manifold. They include air- and waterborne pollution, noise, heat, light – and an excess of social contact. Pollution represents, as a 2017 report by the Lancet Commission on pollution and health puts it, ‘the largest environmental cause of disease and premature death’ among humans, responsible, in 2015, for ‘three…

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Facebook allows stolen content to flourish, its researchers warned

Facebook allows stolen content to flourish, its researchers warned

The Wall Street Journal reports: Facebook has allowed plagiarized and recycled content to flourish on its platform despite having policies against it, the tech giant’s researchers warned in internal memos. About 40% of the traffic to Facebook pages at one point in 2018 went to pages that stole or repurposed most of their content, according to a research report that year by Facebook senior data scientist Jeff Allen, one of a dozen internal communications reviewed by The Wall Street Journal….

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Johnny McEntee — the man who made January 6 possible

Johnny McEntee — the man who made January 6 possible

Jonathan D. Karl writes: In late October 2020, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was attending the confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett when his cellphone rang. He answered with a whisper and walked out to the hallway to take the call. What was so urgent as to pull the chief of staff out of a Supreme Court confirmation hearing just two weeks before a presidential election? On the line was Andrew Hughes, the top staffer at the Department…

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Trump makes — and loses — overnight bid to block January 6 investigators

Trump makes — and loses — overnight bid to block January 6 investigators

Politico reports: If you blinked you missed it. Former President Donald Trump filed an emergency request to a federal judge late Monday night to prevent the National Archives from sending sensitive records to Jan. 6 committee investigators by Friday. And just after midnight, Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected it, contending the request itself was legally defective and “premature.” The unusual exchange, which happened in a span of two hours, comes as Chutkan is already considering an earlier request by Trump to…

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