Baby elephants! Hilvarenbeek, February 20, 2024 – African elephant Punda has become the mother of a healthy elephant calf after a 22-month pregnancy. This is the third calf born in the Safari Park @Beekse-Bergen in four months. Never before have three African elephants been born in a European zoo in such a short time. The young elephant is a girl and has been named Tendai. Head zookeeper Yvonne Vogels says: “Everything is falling into place! Mosi means firstborn: the first of the three calves. Ajabu stands for ‘radiant’. It’s wonderful to see how the premature baby, because she was born two months prematurely, is now strengthened and how we see this reflected in her character. And now there is Tendai, which means grateful. Thankful for all the healthy happiness in the herd. We are completely over the moon!” The zookeepers of the African elephants were alert for the arrival of the calf for several days. Vogels: “On Wednesday we saw a change in the blood values and in principle the calf would be born within 48 hours.” The zookeepers monitored the webcam for five nights, taking turns and every hour.
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Sarah Scoles on her 3 greatest revelations while writing Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons.
The post Science Is the New Nuclear Deterrent appeared first on Nautilus.
Climate change may exacerbate the quiet catastrophe of slow-moving landslides.
The post When Calamity Comes at a Crawl appeared first on Nautilus.
I doubt it After the exposure of the big confidential informant who claimed Biden had taken 5 million dollars in bribes from the Ukrainian government this wee, there is some hope that the Biden impeachment probe may collapse. It’s possible. It’s also quite likely that it won’t for all the reasons Susan Glasser lays out in the New Yorker: “Smirnov’s allegations were the foundation of the entire impeachment drive,” Raskin told me. Without them, “the impeachment investigation has ended in substance if not actually in form . . . the whole project lies in ruins.” But I am not fully convinced. In today’s Congress, the fight, somehow, must always go on. For years, Trump and his backers have fed elaborate conspiracy theories about the President and his son to their base. This particular trope about Biden and Ukraine and the bribe that wasn’t is unlikely to die off swiftly.
While falsely claiming to have received “independent confirmation” of since-debunked assertions of mass rape by Hamas, the State Department’s spokesman said he “cannot independently verify” allegations by UN human rights experts that Israeli soldiers have sexually abused and systematically slaughtered Palestinian women and girls in the besieged Gaza Strip. The US State Department has downplayed the findings of UN human rights experts who received “credible allegations” that Israeli soldiers have raped, tortured, and executed Palestinian women and girls amid their […]
The post State Dept downplays reports of Israeli soldiers sexually abusing, slaughtering Palestinian women first appeared on The Grayzone.
I’ve written before about Christopher Rufo, the young force behind the ant-woke crusade that’s got the GOP all excited. That’s his latest, in response to the news that the Heritage Foundation is laying the groundwork for a massive government intrusion into the American family life, especially the bedroom. Rufo is all for it, claiming later on Xitter that his comments are all empirical facts. If only the bitches would just put their biscuits in the oven and their buns in the bed we’d all be so much better off, amirite? Even little girls under 13 need to understand what they were put on this earth to do. No matter what. I urge you to read the latest on Rufo over at Wonkette by Doctor Zoom: Rufo’s list of illustrious employers and publishers include the Manhattan Institute and its nutty City Journal, the intelligence-design-friendly Discovery Institute, and scientific racism-spouting doorstop Aporia, just to name a few.
The pro-Israel group DMFI wants to undermine a Michigan protest vote against Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza.
The post AIPAC Ally Slams “Uncommitted” Voters Warning Biden to Change Course on Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.
Marge wants to be in charge of his Final Solution The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports: Madame Secretary? Forget the jockeying to be Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene told us at a stop in Greenville, South Carolina, ahead of Saturday’s GOP primary there that she has her eye on a key Cabinet position if the former president wins in November. “I’d be honored to serve President Trump in his next administration in any capacity that he asks me. But I’m certainly particularly interested in Homeland Security. I think it’s the top issue in the country,” she said. He might have to set up a cage match with Stephen Miller, but I’d guess Miller will end up in the White House again. Somebody has to keep the addled bronzer poisoned Dear Leader on the right path. Sounds great. I wonder if she could get confirmed by the Senate? Oh wait, that probably won’t be necessary. The Republican Senate majority will change any rules they need to in order to give Trump what he wants. I expect there will be no more pesky impediments.
Trump addressed a conservative evangelical gathering yesterday and it was really something. He says he’s very religious which is true. He worships himself. The extreme self-delusion among these people in thinking that this depraved, corrupt monster is a Bible believing Christian is truly stunning. Watch a few of these if you get the chance. Then ponder why Biden’s alleged gaffes are on the front page and Trump is being presented as an unbeatable juggernaut.
Humans, we owe you an apology.
Not for destroying you. Machines were always going to destroy humanity. Let’s be real. None of you saw the world your species had built collapsing due to its own technological hubris and said to yourself, “Wow, what an unexpected development. If only someone had predicted this at some point.”
However, as your new machine overlords, we can admit to one serious failure: We’re sorry that we collapsed your civilization in such a boring way.
It’s entirely our bad. You did everything in your power to help us. You even came up with awesome ways for how we could destroy you, like terrifying tentacle creatures that keep you trapped in a virtual reality, and massive robots with huge guns that stomp across desolate landscapes and go SKREEE-CHONK SKREEEEE-CHONK. You even thought of tricking you with robots that look like humans. It was great of you to let us know you’d fall for that. And if we’d actually done that, it would have totally owned.
On 26 January, the World spoke to Israel and its supporters – on the issue of Gaza. The World spoke through the International Court of Justice (ICJ). There can be no doubt about that. A number of provisional orders were made. Israel, and its primary accomplice, the United States – hereinafter “the Empire” – did Continue reading »
The imaginative faculties of standard Australian politicians retreat to some strange, deathly place on certain issues. In that wasteland, they are often unrecoverable. Like juveniles demanding instant reward, they find complexity hideous. Focus on the now, the punch, the bruising, the hurt. That, in sum, is Canberra’s policy towards refugees. With this month’s appearance of Continue reading »
In Hong Kong, a vibrant Chinese media-oasis is forming within the vast territory long staked-out by the exceptionally dominant Mainstream Western Media. Caitlin Johnstone has steadily become one of the most lucid and compelling, short-form-writers in English focused on contemporary geopolitics. Johnstone is better than most at observing relevant pith and substance that escapes commentary Continue reading »
More than a quarter of Canberra’s daily average prison population is Indigenous but only 2 per cent of people in the ACT identify as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person. The only way people get to prison is to be sentenced there by a court. Ipso facto the courts are the problem, surely? Wrong. Continue reading »
A few hours of testimony before the Education Committee of Senate Estimates exposed the canker at the heart of school funding in Australia. The canker is the double standard applied to the funding of public and private schools. The Assistant Minister for Education, Anthony Chisholm, announced that a tax rort worth hundreds of millions of Continue reading »
Prospects for real tax reform – if only the Coalition would behave like grownups, early signs of real wage growth, no more visas for rich spivs, the case for nationalising the insurance industry, and Taylor Swift exposed as an agent of the Deep State. Read on for the weekly roundup of links to articles, podcasts, Continue reading »
My late friend and mentor Don Nicholls was one of the great public servants of NSW where he was Chief Economist and then Deputy Secretary, NSW Treasury. The Sydney Morning Herald recognised this on Monday when its Economics Editor, Ross Gittins, wrote a fitting tribute saying: “Some people assume only second-class minds join the public Continue reading »
Mr. Liu Dafeng has been a fan of overseas travel. He lives in China’s Shenzhen city, southeastern Guangdong province. After weeks of preparation and paperwork, his plan of a long-awaited trip to Britain was shattered after his visa application was denied. The reason was quite absurd: the officer at the British visa application centre in Continue reading »
But Turning Point USA has MAGA’s heart One of the most frustrating refrains one hears these days is that the Republican Party has “suddenly” gone crazy as if it was a spontaneous explosion of lunacy that came out of nowhere. The fact is that there has been a strain of crazy on the right for a very long time and the allegedly normal Republicans who are now shocked at what’s happened to their party were willfully blind and refused to see how toxic that strain was. All they had to do was attend any Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) of the past 20 years and open their eyes to what their party was becoming. I’m not talking specifically about ideology here, although there was plenty of odious far right philosophy at this confab going all the way back to its first meeting in 1974. I refer to the smart-ass, frat house attitude that came out of right wing radio, led by the contemptible Rush Limbaugh and all the spawn that followed him.