A new species of venomous snake has been discovered in Australia.
What is now known as the Desert Whip Snake, Demansia cyanochasma, was discovered by DNA researcher James Nankivell at The University of Adelaide and South Australian Museum honorary researcher Mark Hutchinson, along with herpetologists Brad Maryan and Brian Bush,.
This species had been mistaken for a different species for years. But, by studying a collection of tissue samples, researchers determined that the species was actually entirely its own.
This is because the desert whip snake has many similarities with other desert snakes.
"It's really a successful and widespread animal, it's just that it's taken this long to be able to work out it's actually a distinct species and not the same thing as you see on the west coast or the east coast [of Australia]," Hutchinson told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). "It's taken the addition of the genetic profiling that (Nankivell) was able to do."
Now, a new analysis has confirmed that a vast “underground labyrinth” of passageways exists below the site, according to a statement from a team of researchers.
The team found the tunnels beneath the ruins of Mitla, an ancient city in present-day Oaxaca. Mitla served as a religious center for the Zapotecs, a group that emerged from Mexico’s Oaxaca Valley around the sixth century B.C.E. The city’s stunning above-ground mosaics and murals still stand at the site.
In addition to local lore, historical accounts support tales of the tunnels. Writing in 1674, a Dominican chronicler named Francisco Burgoa described an extensive cavity in the earth at Mitla, which a group of Spanish missionaries decided to explore. But when they descended into the maze, “such was the corruption and bad smell, the dampness of the floor, and a cold wind which extinguished the lights, that at the little distance they had already penetrated … they resolved to come out, and ordered this infernal gate to be thoroughly closed with masonry,” wrote Burgoa, per a translation.
The missionaries sealed all entrances to the tunnel network, which the Zapotecs had called Lyobaa, or “place of rest.”
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You’re probably familiar with sweet, briney snow crab — Chionoecetes opilio — which is commonly found on the menus of chain restaurants like Red Lobster. A plate of crimson legs with drawn butter there will cost you $32.99. In a regular year, a good portion of the snow crab America eats comes from the plant, owned by the multibillion-dollar company Trident Seafoods.
Not that long ago, at the peak of crab season in late winter, temporary workers at the plant would double the population of the town, butchering, cooking, freezing, and boxing 100,000 pounds of snow crab per day, along with processing halibut from a small fleet of local fishermen. Boats full of crab rode into the harbor at all hours, sometimes motoring through swells so perilous they’ve become the subject of a popular collection of YouTube videos. People filled the town’s lone tavern in the evenings, and the plant cafeteria, the only restaurant in town, opened to locals. In a normal year, taxes on crab and local investments in crab fishing could bring St. Paul more than $2 million.
Then came the massive, unexpected drop in the crab population — a crash scientists linked to record-warm ocean temperatures and less ice formation, both associated with climate change. In 2021, federal authorities severely limited the allowable catch. In 2022, they closed the fishery for the first time in 50 years. Industry losses in the Bering Sea crab fishery climbed into the hundreds of millions of dollars. St. Paul lost almost 60 percent of its tax revenue overnight. Leaders declared a “cultural, social, and economic emergency.” Town officials had reserves to keep the community’s most basic functions running, but they had to start an online fundraiser to pay for emergency medical services.
Through the windshield of the truck I was riding in, I could see the only cemetery on the hillside, with weathered rows of orthodox crosses. Van Halen played on the only radio station. I kept thinking about the meaning of a cultural emergency.
Some of Alaska’s Indigenous villages have been occupied for thousands of years, but modern rural life can be hard to sustain because of the high costs of groceries and fuel shipped from outside, limited housing, and scarce jobs. St. Paul’s population was already shrinking ahead of the crab crash. Young people departed for educational and job opportunities. Older people left to be closer to medical care. St. George, its sister island, lost its school years ago and now has about 40 residents.
We're destroying our planet, our lands, our oceans, our way of being and even our jobs. We have got to address climate change.
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
In retrospect, we should have seen this coming.
Robert Kennedy, Jr., who has presidential ambitions, has long trafficked in conspiracy theories. In particular, he is an anti-vaxxer.
This week, however, he went to the truly dark side:
“Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Mr. Kennedy said at a private gathering in New York that was captured on videotape by The New York Post. “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
So, yes — shocked, but not surprised.
Last week I sat down for a private, “off the record” dinner, with members of the press in New York. Since then, the media has launched a desperate smear campaign to continue their efforts to marginalize me in the eyes of the public.
No, you didn't sit down for an "off the record" dinner because there is no such thing, you stupid moron. There's a dinner where conversations are "off the record." But there's no off the record dinner.
These attacks are baseless and fly in the face of my own decades-long history of strong support for the Jewish community, as well as my family’s lifelong support for civil rights.
They're baseless attacks? Really? Because I know you and I know Kerry. And your sister didn't want to call you out publicly. Here is the statement Kerry Kennedy issued:
I strongly condemn my brother's deplorable and untruthful remarks last week about Covid being engineered for ethnic targeting. His statements do not represent what I believe or what Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights stand for, with our 50+-year track record of protecting rights and standing against racism and all forms of discrimination.
Click here to go to The Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Organization to read the statement if you don't believe it.
And Olafimihan Oshin (THE HILL) reports:
“My uncle’s comments were hurtful and wrong,” the 42-year-old former congressman wrote in a tweet Monday. “I unequivocally condemn what he said.”
I don't think you can hide behind anything with regards to "my family's lifelong" when your family is publicly calling you out and rejecting your statements. When you've brought real shame to the Kennedy name. The big bet, among your family, was that your outrageous remarks were going to be about LGBTQ+ people. No one in your family was expecting you to go for the gold with racism.
Yet here we are.
Junior insists:
As we all know, the more that my campaign catches on with the American public, the more I will be attacked and smeared by a press whose job it is to marginalize anyone who challenges entrenched interests, such as the military-industrial complex with its endless wars, and Big Pharma with its hijacking of American healthcare.
You don't believe in universal healthcare and you don't believe in regulating pharmacy so this is just another example of you spitting our words without giving them any thought. You know that kind of posing played well in your twenties but when you left your thirties, it just looked sad.
And, excuse me, your campaign catching on. It's done the complete opposite. In your campaign's first e-mail you were trumpeting 20% support among Democrats. But not only have you not increased that number, it actually fell to 16% and that's before you decided to grab a torch and a white sheet as you went around burning crosses on front lawns.
Junior insists:
The intensity of their attacks shows they are taking me — and my chances of winning — seriously. They have stooped to this because their other efforts at silencing me have failed.
No. People are getting tired of you and no one wants to indulge you anymore. You're not John-John in your shorts saluting at a funeral. You're a 69-year-old man named Junior who has disappointed the hell out of so many in such a short time.
Junior claims:
We can show them that these smear tactics won’t work outside the echo chamber of corporate media. They won’t work, because of supporters like you who see through these tactics that have been used over decades to smear one peace advocate after another.
The echo chamber of corporate media? Your sister Kerry and your nephew Joe are the echo chamber of corporate media? Junior, how many steroids are you taking?
And then he goes in for the hook, let's show the country that racism can raise money! He writes:
Imagine what they will think when their vicious smear campaign results in MORE support, not less!
But the Project’s document argues that Kennedy’s recent comments about Jewish and Chinese people, which were quickly hailed by Neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers as “100% correct”, were not an aberration but fitted a long pattern.
Earlier this summer Kennedy touted a meeting with Ice Cube, a rapper who issued bizarre antisemitic tweets, and publicly defended musician Roger Waters, who was embroiled in controversy after donning a costume intended to evoke Nazi attire at a concert in Germany.
The report says Kennedy has also repeatedly promoted and praised fringe online broadcaster James Corbett, a Sandy Hook and 9/11 conspiracy theorist who has claimed that “Hitler and the Nazis were 100% completely and utterly set up”.
Kennedy has often allied himself with National of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who regularly unleashed tirades about alleged Jewish control of media and government. Kennedy met Farrakhan at his Chicago home in 2015, with Farrakhan later tweeting that they discussed “a vaccine that is designed to affect Black males”.
The Project details how Kennedy himself has frequently invoked Nazi Germany when pushing debunked theories about vaccines. He put out a video that showed infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci with a mustache reminiscent of Adolf Hitler and used the word “holocaust” to describe children he believes were hurt by vaccines in 2015.
Last year, at a Washington rally organized by his group Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy complained that people’s rights were being violated by public health measures that had been taken to reduce the number of people sickened and killed by Covid-19. He said: “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.” He later apologised.
For years, the document says, Kennedy has targeted a particularly dangerous form of vaccine denial at Black people. In 2021 at the height of the Covid-19 vaccination campaign, he released Medical Racism, a film that promoted disproven claims about the dangers of vaccines and explicitly warned communities of color to be suspicious of “sinister” vaccination campaigns.
Several doctors and experts who participated in the film later denounced it and said they felt used and misled about the message of the documentary. Richard Allen Williams, founder of the Association of Black Cardiologists, called Children’s Health Defense “absolutely a racist operation” particularly dangerous to the Black community.
The events Saturday began outside the Lost Fest event organized by the Equality Toledo LGBTQ advocacy group and continued opposite the offices of the Jewish group.
“Yesterday evening, over a dozen masked neo-Nazis carrying tiki torches attempted to harass attendees at an LGBTQ+ pride event in downtown Toledo before coming to the Jewish Toledo campus in Sylvania to harass Jews,” Laurie Gross, the president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Toledo, wrote in a statement Sunday cosigned by three other Jewish community leaders.
“To members of our Jewish community, there are no known active threats at this time,” read the statement.
A handful of senators is blocking the confirmation of dozens of highly regarded Biden administration ambassadorial appointments over largely partisan issues having nothing to do with the nominees' qualifications, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said Monday.
In an unusual head-on confrontation with Congress, Blinken complained that action by some senators is crippling the ability of the United States to project its influence on the global stage, stifling the U.S. voice in critical countries in the Middle East and Europe during the raging war in Ukraine and undermining national security.
The diplomatic delays come as hundreds of U.S. military promotions — including the appointment of the commander of the Marine Corps, leaving an acting leader in charge for the first time in more than 100 years — blocked by a single Republican senator from Alabama, former football coach Tommy Tuberville. He objects to the Defense Department’s efforts to provide reproductive and gender-affirming care to service members.
"By failing to confirm these nominees, a handful of senators are keeping our best players on the sidelines," Blinken said.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday that a Senate delay in confirming President Joe Biden's nominees for diplomatic positions was undermining national security, echoing similar concerns from defense officials on delays to military promotions.
Blinken told reporters that he had sent a letter to every member of the Senate urging swift confirmation of dozens of nominees for State Department positions.
The nominations are being held back by Republican Senator Rand Paul while he seeks information from the administration on the origins of COVID-19.
The demolishment of the Al-Sarai Mosque's minaret on Friday morning in Basra sparked protests amongst the Sunni community in Iraq.
The Al-Sarai Mosque is a Sunni mosque and is one of the oldest historical mosques in Iraq. It was built in 1727 and was renovated in 1902 by Abdulwahab Pasha bin Ahmed al-Qurtas.
The Governor of Basra Asad al-Edani announced that the demolition of the minaret was due to complaints from citizens that the minaret created obstacles to traffic and the implementation of a strategic road project in the city.
The minaret of Al Saraji mosque in Basra stood 11 metres high and was destroyed at dawn on Friday despite calls by local officials to restore and preserve the site.
"We consider this a crime against humanity and Iraqis," said Mustafa Al Hussaini, director of Basra's antiquities department.
He said they were not informed that the structure would be demolished.
"I am in shock and am getting condolence messages," Mr Al Hussaini added.
"Some officials are even embarrassed to approach me.
With scorching temperatures and power cuts, Wissam Abed cools off from Baghdad's brutal summer by swimming in the Tigris river, but as Iraqi rivers dry up, so does the age-old pastime.
Near a bridge linking the east of the city to the west, Abed stood in the middle of the river, but the water only came up to his waist.
"I live here in Adhamiya, like my grandfather did before me. Year after year, the water situation gets worse," said the 37-year-old, referring to his neighbourhood nestled along the Tigris in northern Baghdad.
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- Political Tweet of the Week (Comedy)
- Tennessee’s War on Trans People: Court OKs Ban on ...
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- Tweet memoriam
- This edition's playlist
- Highlights
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'Dr.' Naomi Wolf leads those crazies6 hours ago
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MTG the mad rapping queen6 hours ago
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CMT makes the right call6 hours ago
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Look who Elon pays6 hours ago
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I am done with Robert Kennedy Junior6 hours ago
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Young right-wingers go with Trump7 hours ago
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