The Sydney Morning Herald
World's earliest known animal a 540-million-year-old defenceless blob
It looks like a giant blob. It's oddly shaped, and covered in ribs. It has no mouth or eyes.
Since finding the first bizarre fossil trapped in red-orange rocks in South Australia's Flinders Ranges more than 70 years ago, scientists have argued about what these strange creatures could possibly be.
Were they a type of ancient fungus? A giant single-celled organism?
It took a young scientist dangling down a sheer cliff face in the Russian wilderness, fending off mosquitoes and bears, to prove them all wrong — it was an animal.
And at 540 million years old, the creature called Dickinsonia is the world's earliest known animal, scientists have discovered.
Go with the flow: desalination plant study finds 'amazing' ocean impact
The Sydney desalination plant's biggest effect on the nearby ocean is unlikely to be from the release of toxic saline brine, in an unexpected outcome from what is claimed to be the world's first peer-reviewed study into the industry's marine impacts.
The report, published in Water Research this month, found the $2 billion plant had a negligible effect on the offshore ecosystems during the two years it was operating before its mothballing in mid-2012.
“We’re fortunate and relieved that the ecological impacts are minor compared to what people thought might have happened with this development," said Emma Johnston, a professor of marine ecology at the University of NSW and a senior author of the six-year study.
Reuters
Trump chips away at liberal U.S. appeals court majorities
Aided by fellow Republicans in the Senate, … Trump is rapidly filling vacancies on U.S. appeals courts, moving some that had liberal majorities closer to conservative control in an ideological shift that could benefit his administration.
These 13 courts wield considerable power, usually providing the last word on rulings appealed from lower courts on disputes involving federal law.
Their rulings can be challenged before the U.S. Supreme Court, but most such appeals are turned away because the top court typically hears fewer than 100 cases annually. Eleven of the courts handle cases from specific multi-state regions, one handles cases from Washington, D.C., while another specializes in patent cases.
Iran dismisses U.S. offer of talks, says Washington broke last deal
Iran hit back at a U.S. offer of negotiations on Thursday, saying Washington had violated the terms of the last big deal they agreed, the 2015 nuclear accord…
Trump pulled out of that nuclear accord - which curbed Iran’s atomic activities in return for sanctions relief - in May, saying it did not go far enough.
The U.S. special envoy for Iran, Brian Hook, said on Wednesday that Washington now wanted to negotiate a treaty that included Tehran’s ballistic missile program and its regional behavior.
A year after deadly Maria, Puerto Rico still struggles with aftermath
Shuttered businesses, blue tarp roofs and extensively damaged homes can still be seen throughout Puerto Rico a year after Hurricane Maria ripped through the island with 150 mile-per-hour winds, and access to electricity and fresh water remain spotty.
Last month, the U.S. Commonwealth’s government sharply raised the official estimate of Maria’s death toll to almost 3,000 after an independent study. The exact death toll figure remains unknown, and the governor has admitted his administration failed to properly record storm-related deaths…
“Today is a day to remember those who are not physically with us, but left a significant mark after their departure. Hurricane Maria took with it many lives that we will not overlook and that we still remember with a great weight of pain,” Governor Ricardo Rossello said Thursday ahead of a planned memorial event: “One Year After Maria” with religious leaders and government officials.
The Guardian
Private firefighters and five-star hotels: how the rich sit out wildfires
With record-breaking wildfires carving up the American west this summer, firefighters have become the rarest of civil servants: the kind almost universally lauded as heroes. Reinforcements dropped into California’s firefight from as far away as Australia and American Samoa to bolster strained state and federal crews, reaching a high point of 14,000 firefighters on the ground.
Yet other crews have pulled into the fires’ path with a less grandiose purpose: to save only select addresses. These are the private firefighters of the rich or otherwise well-insured: private crews hired by insurance companies to minimize damages and keep policyholders’ homes from going up in smoke...
In western states, the wildfire-evacuated masses have huddled in Best Westerns or on gymnasium floors and are often locked in insurance-claim limbo, while the affluent check into five-star luxury hotels – usually reimbursable by their insurance – confident that their homes are being looked after.
'No accident' Brett Kavanaugh's female law clerks 'looked like models', Yale professor told students
A top professor at Yale Law School who strongly endorsed supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a “mentor to women” privately told a group of law students last year that it was “not an accident” that Kavanaugh’s female law clerks all “looked like models” and would provide advice to students about their physical appearance if they wanted to work for him, the Guardian has learned.
Amy Chua, a Yale professor who wrote a bestselling book on parenting called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, was known for instructing female law students who were preparing for interviews with Kavanaugh on ways they could dress to exude a “model-like” femininity to help them win a post in Kavanaugh’s chambers, according to sources…
One source said that in at least one case, a law student was so put off by Chua’s advice about how she needed to look, and its implications, that she decided not to pursue a clerkship with Kavanaugh, a powerful member of the judiciary who had a formal role in vetting clerks who served in the US supreme court.
'Treating protest as terrorism': US plans crackdown on Keystone XL activists
Angeline Cheek is preparing for disaster. The indigenous organizer from the Fort Peck reservation in Montana fears that the proposed Keystone XL pipeline could break and spill, destroy her tribe’s water, and desecrate sacred Native American sites.
But environmental catastrophe is not the most immediate threat.
The government has characterized pipeline opponents like her as “extremists” and violent criminals and warned of potential “terrorism”, according to recently released records.
The documents suggested that police were organizing to launch an aggressive response to possible Keystone protests, echoing the actions against the Standing Rock movement in North Dakota. There, officers engaged in intense surveillance and faced widespread accusations of excessive force and brutality.
Deutsche Welle
EU also preparing for 'No Deal Brexit'
Although the atmosphere in Salzburg was friendly on Thursday, it appeared that the UK and the EU were no closer to solving one of the most intractable issues at hand: how to avoid imposing a harder border on the island of Ireland and how to handle future trade.
Concern was mounting at the informal summit that no final Brexit deal will be approved ahead of the March 31, 2019 deadline and that no plan for a smooth and orderly British exit from the bloc.
"Everybody shared the view that while there are positive elements in the [UK] proposal," said European Council President Donald Tusk, but then added that "the suggested framework for economic cooperation will not work, not least because it risks undermining the single market."
'It's staggering!': Marine Le Pen outraged after court orders her to undergo psychological examination
A French court in Nanterre that is hearing a case against Marine Le Pen for sharing violent images on her Twitter account has ordered a psychological assessment of the leader of the far-right party National Rally (formerly the National Front) in order to determine whether she is, "capable of understanding remarks and answering questions." Furthermore, the psychologist examining her is tasked with ascertaining whether her mental health may pose a risk to the public.
The case against Le Pen began in March, after she was stripped of her parliamentary immunity. She is on trial for violating French laws regarding the distribution of messages that, "incite terrorism or pornography or seriously harm human dignity.
"Though the law requires psychological assessments in such cases, Le Pen voiced outrage at the decision and said she would defy the order: "I'd like to see how the judge would try to force me to do it."
Al Jazeera
South Africa's top court legalises private use of cannabis
South Africa's highest court has legalised the private use of marijuana, upholding a lower court's ruling that found the criminalisation of cannabis was unconstitutional.
In delivering the Constitutional Court's unanimous verdict, Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo on Tuesday declared the law banning marijuana use in private by adults "is unconstitutional and therefore invalid".
"It will not be a criminal offence for an adult person to use or be in possession of cannabis in private for his or her personal consumption," he said in Johannesburg.
Rights group calls Egypt an 'open-air prison' for critics
The human rights organisation Amnesty International has called on Egyptian authorities to release people imprisoned for peacefully expressing their opinions and to end legislation that has allowed the state to clamp down on freedom of speech in the country.
In a new campaign launched on Thursday, titled Egypt, an Open-Air Prison for Critics, Amnesty said that Egyptians are living in a time of "unprecedented severity" amid a government crackdown on freedom of expression.
Since December 2017, the rights group has documented at least 111 individuals who have been arrested by the National Security Services for criticising Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and the general human rights situation in Egypt.
"It is currently more dangerous to criticise the government in Egypt than at any time in the country's recent history," Najia Bounaim, Amnesty's North Africa Campaigns Director, said in a statement.
Overworked, abused, hungry: Vietnamese domestic workers in Saudi
Pham Thi Dao lives in an abandoned house with her seven-year-old daughter Hong Anh, off the beaten track from the central town of Hoa Binh province, southwest of Hanoi.
Dao, 46, was a domestic worker in Saudi Arabia for more than seven months until she returned to Vietnam in April.
"I worked from 5am until 1am in the morning, and was allowed to eat once at 1pm," Dao told Al Jazeera of her experience in the port city of Yanbu. "It was the same every day - a slice of lamb and a plate of plain rice. After nearly two months, I was like a mad person."
The Los Angeles Times
U.N. report says cultivation of the plant used to make cocaine is surging in Colombia
Colombia saw a record level of coca plant cultivation last year, according to a United Nations report released Wednesday, raising renewed concerns about the war on drugs.
Reasons for the increased cultivation of the plant used to make cocaine include the suspension three years ago of an aerial herbicide spraying program and a lack of alternatives for poor farmers, authorities said.
Colombian President Ivan Duque, who took office last month, has called coca production a national security risk and faces challenges to placate the United States, a staunch ally that has spent billions of dollars in anti-drug aid in the country…
Enough coca plants were grown in 2017 to produce an astounding 1,379 metric tons of cocaine, up 31% from the 2016 harvest, said Bo Mathiasen, representative of the U.N.’s Office on Drugs and Crime in Colombia.
7 years after it was 'liberated,' the only thing certain in Libya is the uncertainty
Dozens of people have been killed after days of violent clashes in the suburbs of Tripoli, with rival militias fighting fierce street battles for control of the Libyan capital.
The upheaval is the latest setback in the long running and highly chaotic effort to cobble together a government and restore stability after strongman Moammar Kadafi was toppled from power during the height of the “Arab Spring” in 2011.
Since Kadafi was ousted, dozens of militias and an Islamic State affiliate have engaged in turf wars for control of Libya’s cities, even as countries including France, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Turkey and Egypt tried to intervene — their efforts usually only fueling the turmoil.
Guatemalan parents reunited with son held in detention, but they're worried: 'He's not the same boy'
Over the last month, Nuria Lanuza noticed a troubling change in her son Erik. During their weekly phone conversations, he used to be talkative and spoke loudly. In time, however, he began to speak quietly. His answers were short, his words slow.
The mother chalked it up to sadness. She was in Guatemala and Erik was in an immigration detention center for children in the Chicago area. He and his father had hoped to get asylum in the U.S., and while Erik was held in detention, his father was deported.
But this week they learned of another possible reason for the change in their son. At a governmental reception center in Guatemala City where the family was reunited Wednesday, Lanuza and her husband, Erik Castillo, learned that while in Chicago their 12-year-old son had been put on an antipsychotic drug called risperidone — a powerful medication used to treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. It’s also used to control extreme emotions, thoughts and behaviors.
Mongabay
Scientists say they’ve uncovered the mechanisms that make deep soil a sink or source of emissions
Researchers say they have discovered the conditions that determine whether deep soil acts as a source of carbon emissions, releasing heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, or as a sink, sequestering the carbon and keeping it from contributing to global climate change.
According to Caitlin Hicks Pries, an assistant professor of biology at Dartmouth College in the United States and the lead author of a study to be published in next month’s issue of the journal Soil Biology and Biochemistry, understanding how deep soil carbon will behave in a warmer world is of vital importance to projecting future impacts of global warming.
It’s estimated that as much as 2,400 gigatons of carbon is stored in soil and that two-thirds of that carbon lies at a depth greater than 20 centimeters — meaning that there is enough deep soil carbon in the world to double the amount of carbon dioxide currently in Earth’s atmosphere.
How a national reserve stopped the extinction of the Peruvian vicuña
At an altitude of 13,450 feet, the icy wind pounds whatever lies in its path. After 23 years of living in the Pampa Galeras – Barbara D’Achille National Reserve, Hernán Sosaya is well-adjusted and can withstand the blustering wind.
At the top of a plain, a vicuña (Vicugna vicugnanotices) and a cousin to llamas, sees that we are only a few feet away and raises its head.
“You can recognize the male because it’s always at the front of the herd, attentively watching for danger,” says Sosaya. The male vicuña starts to move away and the rest of the group trots along behind him.
The park rangers at Pampa Galeras, like Sosaya, are experts at monitoring vicuñas. Every day, they are monitored within the park, which is 40 square miles and located in the district of Lucanas in Peru’s Ayacucho region. With more than 5,000 vicuñas currently living in the protected area, monitoring them has not been easy.
MercoPress
Argentina's economy contracts 4.2% in second quarter: severe drought blamed
Argentina's economy contracted sharply in the second quarter after a severe drought roiled agricultural production and as the country works with the International Monetary Fund to stem spiraling inflation and control government finances.
Gross domestic product fell 4.2% between April and June from a year earlier, the national statistics agency Indec said in a report, marking its first contraction in more than a year. It was the worst performance since 2014.
One of the worst droughts in years helped drive a steep decline in exports from the country, a top seller of soy and corn in the world market.
US, the world's top crude oil producer, but global geopolitical uncertainty prevails
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said that the U.S. likely surpassed Saudi Arabia and Russia earlier this year to become the world’s top crude oil producer. The EIA based its disclosure on preliminary estimates in its Short Term Energy Outlook which is released every month.
The U.S., in news that was widely covered by media at the time, bypassed Saudi Arabia in February to become the second largest global oil producer, the EIA says. It was the first time in more than 20 years that the U.S. out produced Saudi Arabia. Then in June and August, U.S. output bypassed Russia for the first time since February 1999.
The EIA expects that U.S. crude oil production, most of it light sweet crude, will continue to exceed Russian and Saudi Arabian crude oil production for the remaining months of 2018 and through 2019.
Bloomberg
Corporate America Gets More Cash-Rich, Thanks to Fed Revisions
U.S. businesses have a much bigger cash hoard than previously thought, at least according to new Federal Reserve data that reflect changes in methodology.
The value of financial assets held by nonfinancial companies rose to $21.8 trillion in the second quarter, the report showed Thursday. More importantly, businesses held $4.35 trillion in so-called liquid assets, which include cash, deposits, debt securities and stocks. That followed $4.38 trillion in the first quarter, upwardly revised from a $2.66 trillion figure.
Al Gore Is Still Optimistic
Bloomberg: It’s easy to feel disheartened and overwhelmed and even apathetic. What’s the optimist part of this that we have to keep in mind?
Gore: Some people go straight from denial to despair without pausing on the intermediate step of actually addressing and solving the problem. The sustainability revolution is the largest investing and the largest set of business opportunities in all of history. Many companies are becoming aware of the risks of continuing with the fossil fuel economy, with the exploitative business models that ignore waste, ignore pollution, ignore the exploitation of communities and workforces.
When companies get with the program and adopt sustainability goals, all kinds of benefits come to them, including recruitment and retention. The brightest and best young men and women want to work for companies that give them a good income but also give them an opportunity to say to their family and friends that they’re part of something larger than just making money, that they’re helping to make the world a better place.
Vox
There have been 263 days in 2018 — and 262 mass shootings in America
Multiple mass shootings have occurred in just the past two days — at a courthouse in Masontown, Pennsylvania; a business in Middleton, Wisconsin; and a Rite Aid distribution center in Aberdeen, Maryland.
This is, apparently, not abnormal for 2018. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been nearly as many mass shootings so far this year as there have been days.
“There have been 262 American mass shootings (4+ shot or killed in the same incident, not including the shooter) in the 263 days of 2018,” the Gun Violence Archive tweeted.
Measles cases have hit a record high in Europe. Blame austerity.
Europe is in the midst of a massive measles outbreak, with more than 41,000 cases reported in the first half of this year. The deadly virus has spread to 21 out of 30 countries in the region, and the World Health Organization says cases have hit a record high, with more than Europe’s annual total during the past five years…
The good news: We have a vaccine that’s highly effective and can prevent measles spread. So what gives?
In the press, Europe’s measles problem has been attributed mainly to parents refusing vaccines for their kids and who’ve been spurred on by the populist movement and anti-science rhetoric there. Russian trolls spreading disinformation have also shared some blame. And then there’s Andrew Wakefield, the discredited physician-researcher from Britain. With a small and fraudulent study, Wakefield helped perpetuate the myth that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism and ignited the modern anti-vaccine movement (even recently fanning a measles outbreak in Minnesota).
The Verge
The latest Doctor Who trailer reminds you who’s in charge
We’re only a few weeks away from the premiere of the latest season of Doctor Who, and the BBC has released a new trailer that shows off more of the upcoming adventures of the TARDIS team ahead of its October 7th release date.
A new creative team took over the show, and a new Doctor is flying the iconic blue police box, but the core of the show is still largely intact. As Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteen Doctor intones: “I’m the Doctor. When people need help, I never refuse.”
The Washington Post
‘These are the stories of our lives’: Prep school alumni hear echoes in assault claim
Bettina Lanyi remembers. It was 1986, and she was in eighth grade. She and a friend went to a house in Washington’s Tenleytown neighborhood packed with high school kids, including a throng of boys from Gonzaga College High School and Georgetown Preparatory School. There was a lot of beer. A few fights broke out. Lanyi recalls being pawed and kissed. It freaked her out. She hadn’t been drinking, but her friend, also an eighth-grader, had.
Lanyi turned around to see a large freshman from one of the schools lying on top of her friend. Lanyi, then a petite 13-year-old, shoved the boy and kicked him. The boy was surprised and appealed to Lanyi to let him continue. “I’ll never get her number otherwise,” he told her. She took her friend and left.
Lanyi has thought about that night often since Sunday, when Christine Blasey Ford publicly accused Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when she was a 15-year-old student at Holton-Arms School and he was a 17-year-old student at Georgetown Prep. She has thought about stories of male entitlement and drunken sexual assault she heard from classmates while she was a student at Prep’s Bethesda neighbor, Stone Ridge of the Sacred Heart, and the many more stories she has heard in the years since their graduation.
At this rate, Earth risks sea level rise of 20 to 30 feet, historical analysis shows
Temperatures not much warmer than the planet is experiencing now were sufficient to melt a major part of the East Antarctic ice sheet in Earth’s past, scientists reported Wednesday, including during one era about 125,000 years ago when sea levels were as much as 20 to 30 feet higher than they are now.
“It doesn’t need to be a very big warming, as long as it stays 2 degrees warmer for a sufficient time, this is the end game,” said David Wilson, a geologist at Imperial College London and one of the authors of the new research, which was published in Nature. Scientists at institutions in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Spain also contributed to the work.
The research concerns a little-studied region called the Wilkes Subglacial Basin, which is roughly the size of California and Texas combined and contains more than 10 feet of potential sea-level rise. Fronted by three enormous glaciers named Cook, Mertz and Ninnis, the Wilkes is known to be vulnerable to fast retreat because the ice here is not standing on land and instead is rising up from a deep depression in the ocean floor.
Washington and many other cities have experienced a record number of warm nights this year
Across large portions of the nation, it has been an exceptionally long, steamy summer. While there have been plenty of hot afternoons, unusually warm nights have set this summer apart, piling up in record numbers.
From Southern California to northern Maine, scores of U.S. cities have racked up more warms nights than ever previously recorded, as indicated by the frequency of low temperatures of 70 degrees or higher…
An increase in the frequency and intensity of warm nights is an expectation of climate change, because of urbanization and increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Overnight low temperatures are warming “nearly twice as fast as afternoon high temperatures,” NOAA said.
Ars Technica
Senate can’t protect senators, staff from cyber attacks, Wyden warns
Sen. Ron Wyden has been a squeaky wheel about the US Senate's weak security posture for a while. In April, the Oregon Democrat raised objections over the lax physical security measures for Senate staff—including ID badges that just have pictures of smart chips like those on other access cards used across government agencies, rather than actual chips, and provide no access controls. Now, as the November mid-term election approaches, Wyden has written a letter to Senate leadership decrying the lack of assistance that the Senate's own information security team can provide in protecting senators' accounts and devices from targeted attacks, even as evidence mounts that such attacks are being staged.
According to Wyden, his office had discovered that "at least one major technology company" had recently detected targeted attacks against members of the Senate and their staffers—and that these attacks had apparently been staged by groups tied to foreign intelligence agencies…
Current law and Senate rules allow the Senate's Sergeant at Arms (SAA) Office—which oversees Senate computers, telecommunications, and technology support services (among other things)—to handle security only for systems specifically owned by the Senate. But the SAA does not handle security for mobile devices or other Internet-based services. The SAA team has a lot on its plate already—and has a few information security job openings at the moment. But with information security within Senate offices left largely to senators and the staffers themselves beyond their senate.gov email accounts and the Senate's physical network, there remains a significant attack surface for foreign adversaries to target.
Major Antarctic ice sheet shrank when it wasn’t much warmer than now
Are the big ice sheets in Antarctica stable in the face of the warming we've already committed to? That's a more serious question than it might sound. The continent is thought to hold enough ice to raise ocean levels by over 55 meters if it were to melt—enough to drown every single bit of coastal infrastructure we have and send people migrating far inland from the present-day shoreline.
But the melting of this ice is a complicated process, one that depends on things like the dynamics of glaciers as they push through coastal hills, the shape of the seafloor where the ice meets it, and the slope of the basins the ice sheets sit in. It's tough to reason out how much ice would be lost for a given bit of warming. As a result, we're left with historical comparisons—the last time it warmed by that amount, how much ice did we lose?
This week, we got some new information on this topic courtesy of a detailed study of Antarctica's Wilkes Subglacial Basin. The work showed that it wasn't so much the amount of warming the ice experienced; it was how long it stayed warm.