"The European Space Agency has just selected a probe called Envision to go study the second planet from the Sun… Esa made the announcement one week after its American counterpart, Nasa, chose two Venus projects of its own, known as Veritas and Davinci+."
"Earlier last month, a cargo ship carrying chemicals caught fire off the coast of Sri Lanka - leaving in its wake an environmental disaster that the island will likely have to live with for decades… For days it stood burning off the Sri Lanka coast, plumes of thick dark smoke that could be seen from miles away… But though the flames have now been doused - the problems have only just begun."
"Around the world, volunteers are getting a vaccine developed to prevent tuberculosis in studies that have nothing to do with TB. Called Bacillus Calmette-Guérin, or BCG, the shot is being tested as a treatment for type 1 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis and even COVID-19."
"As temperatures rise in California and people in search of respite head for the beach, there's a new concern beyond damaging sun rays and strong undercurrents: disease-carrying ticks that appear to be spreading all along the Golden State's coast."
"A higher-than-expected number of young men have experienced heart inflammation after their second dose of the mRNA COVID-19 shots from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, according to data from two vaccine safety monitoring systems, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Thursday."
"House Bill 248, or the 'Vaccine Choice and Anti-discrimination Act,' was introduced in April by Rep. Jennifer Gross (R-West Chester). It would allow individuals to decline any vaccine and for parents to decline for their children to be vaccinated… Testimony for the bill has drawn national attention this week after one of its proponents falsely claimed that the COVID-19 vaccines can leave people magnetized." If you had written that in a novel the editors would have rightly asked you to remove it as being too outlandish.
"Many education experts say in-person instruction is the best way to help hasten an academic recovery for those who fell behind and to address emotional and social consequences after two disrupted school years. But the orders may deny many families, especially parents of color, the choice to continue an education style they say was working for them." People learn differently, and this continues to surprise lots of other people.
"The bad-faith 'balance' game is used by fraudsters and crooks to sow doubt. It’s how homeopaths, anti-vaxers, eugenicists, raw milk pushers and other members of the Paltrow-Industrial Complex played the BBC and other sober-sided media outlets, demanding that they be given airtime to rebut scientists’ careful, empirical claims with junk they made up on the spot." Cory Doctorow on how denialism is it's own industry, mostly focusing on smoking, but with take aways into other denialism products, and his tweet storm about how denialism works.
"Treasury yields fell again on Friday morning, as investors shrugged off the 5% annual jump in inflation reported in the previous session and appeared to buy the Federal Reserve’s argument that the price increases will be temporary."
"The cost of used cars and trucks jumped 10 percent month-on-month in April and was up 21 percent compared with a year earlier, making it one of the main drivers of the 4.2 percent year-on-year surge in the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ consumer price index. Core inflation—excluding volatile food and energy prices—hit 3 percent."
"States are about to undertake a reckless and unnecessary experiment in cutting off expanded unemployment in the midst of a rocky recovery, with the lives and livelihoods of an estimated 4 million workers in the balance." Cruelty is the point of the program.
"What should people know about how AI products are made?… We aren’t used to thinking about these systems in terms of the environmental costs. But saying, 'Hey, Alexa, order me some toilet rolls,' invokes into being this chain of extraction, which goes all around the planet… We’ve got a long way to go before this is green technology. Also, systems might seem automated but when we pull away the curtain we see large amounts of low paid labour, everything from crowd work categorising data to the never-ending toil of shuffling Amazon boxes. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous."
"And DarkSide wasn't even one of the most prolific ransomware groups, said Brett Callow, an analyst at the cybersecurity company Emsisoft… 'While the seizing of the funds is a positive, I don't think it will act as a deterrent at all,' Callow said in a text message. 'For the criminals, it's a win some, lose some situation, and the amount they win means the occasional loss is a minor setback.'"
"U.S.-China relations are getting worse and have not 'reset' under President Joe Biden in the way that many had previously expected, said Max Baucus, a former American ambassador to China… 'The situation unfortunately is generally still deteriorating,' Baucus told CNBC’s 'Squawk Box Asia' on Friday."
"If all goes according to plan, Israel will swear in a new government on Sunday, ending Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s record 12-year rule and a political crisis that inflicted four elections on the country in less than two years."
"With the Biden administration crowing that 'America is back' and looking to bask in applause for resetting the transatlantic relationship onto a positive path, European leaders aren’t quite ready to start clapping. They’re expecting proof that America is in it for the long haul, and are already steeling themselves for Washington’s next departure from the uneasy transatlantic marriage."
"A bipartisan group of senators is eyeing an infrastructure deal with $579 billion in new spending as negotiators try to strike a nearly $1 trillion deal on President Joe Biden’s top priority, according to those briefed on the plan."
"Texas will begin building its own border wall and next week will start arresting migrants who trespass on private property, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott announced Thursday… Abbott also spoke of a disaster declaration he had issued last week, which directed the state's Department of Public Safety to enforce both federal and state criminal laws, including criminal trespassing, smuggling and human trafficking while having Texas Health and Human Services Commission take 'all necessary steps' to discontinue the state licensure of 'any child care facility that shelters or detains unlawful immigrants' under a contract with the federal government." It might just be the reporting, but it doesn't sound like Texas knows what the fuck it's actually doing.
"FBI Director Chris Wray on Thursday suggested 'serious charges' are still coming in the criminal investigation of the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump." Serious charges brought by serious people with serious briefcases, or something like that.
"Rep. Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, called for an inspector general investigation of the Trump Justice Department on Thursday after a report said that his phone records, along with those of aides and another member of the committee, had been seized — what he condemned as a 'terrible abuse of power.'… 'It also makes the Department of Justice just a fully owned subsidiary of the president’s personal legal interests and political interests,' the California Democrat told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow."
Blame Canada… "Social media posts claim Democrats are responsible for crises that mirror some of the worst events of the past century. The claims, however, are false or misleading; the pandemic originated in China, not the US, ongoing economic problems stem from a recession that the coronavirus caused, rather than new government policies, and protests about race peaked in 2020 under Republican president Donald Trump, long before Joe Biden entered the White House."
"Moderate Senate Democrats from Republican-leaning states and swing states are flexing the power that comes along with a 50-50 Senate, where every vote has the potential to make or break a bill." There are two ways to play that field. The first, and it appears the way Schumer is playing it, is to molly coddle the moderates and put them into more of a power position that they warrant. Throw them in as the "ambassadors" of bipartisanship, the go betweens, and they raise even more of a power block. The second would be to make them work for their power by making them the ones responsible for "bipartisan" action (as in, "why couldn't you get the Republicans to come our way" instead of a "what do they want for their vote") and the ones to blame for failed initiatives.
"Trump benefited from the white evangelical support that Reagan helped solidify, but he also presided over a country that, religiously, looks far different from the one Reagan took over after 1980. Trump's presidency is one early case study in how the Republican Party — which has long associated itself with conservative Christian values — may attempt to deal with a country that's less and less religious." Good thing the "conservative white evangelicals" (ie the social conservatives) that the strategy is based on aren't all that religious to begin with.
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