James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

Microplastics are pervasive, found everywhere on Earth, from the Sahara Desert to patches of Arctic sea ice. Yet despite these plastic particles’ ubiquity, scientists have struggled to determine exactly how many of them are in our atmosphere.

Now, a new estimate published in Nature suggests that land sources release about 600 quadrillion (600,000,000,000,000,000) microplastic particles into the atmosphere every year, about 20 times more than the number of particles contributed by oceans (about 26 quadrillion).

The median concentration of microplastics is 0.08 particle per cubic meter (m³) over land and 0.003 particle per m³ over sea, the study found.

These estimates are between 100 and 10,000 times lower than previous accountings of atmospheric microplastics—a discrepancy that the researchers behind the new study say underscores the need for better global measures of these pollutants.

“We knew that uncertainties of existing emission estimates were very large,” says Andreas Stohl, senior author of the study and an atmospheric scientist at the University of Vienna. “They are even still large after our study, but we could at least narrow down the uncertainty range, especially when it comes to the importance of land-based versus ocean-based emissions.”

A microplastic is any plastic particle sized between one micron and five millimeters. Easily swept up by wind and carried long distances by water, these tiny motes are also exceedingly difficult to detect and almost impossible to remove from the environment.

Past estimates have focused on accounting for microplastics generated by human activity or directly measuring their concentration in the air in any given area. But these measures are highly variable: along the southeastern coast of China, for example, atmospheric microplastic estimates have ranged from 0.004 to 190 particles per m³. To try and get at a more global estimate, Stohl and his team compiled 2,782 measurements collected at 283 locations worldwide.

The researchers hope the findings will act as a baseline for future studies of global microplastic levels, including new measures that will be able to account for even smaller particles than they did.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate found 101 sexualized images of children as part of its sample of 20,000 images made by Grok from December 29th to January 8th. Using that sample, the group estimated that 23,000 sexualized images of children had been produced in that time frame. Over that 11-day period, they estimated that on average, a sexualized image of a child was produced every 41 seconds. Not all of the sexualized images Grok has produced appear to be illegal, but reports indicate at least some likely cross the line.

There is tremendous confusion about what happens to be true on Grok at any given moment. Grok has offered responses with misleading details, claiming at one point, for instance, that it had restricted image generation to paying X subscribers while still allowing direct access on X to free users. Though Musk has claimed that new guardrails prevent Grok from undressing people, our testing showed that isn’t necessarily true. Using a free account on Grok, The Verge was able to generate deepfake images of real people in skimpy clothing, in sexually suggestive positions, after new rules were supposedly in effect. As of this writing, some egregious prompts appear to have been blocked, but people are remarkably clever at getting around rules-based bans.

X does seem to have at least partially restricted Grok’s image editing features to paid subscribers, however — which makes it very likely that for at least some of these objectionable images, money is actually changing hands. You can purchase a subscription to X on Stripe or through the Apple and Google app stores using your credit card. Musk has also suggested through his posts that he doesn’t think undressing people is a problem. This isn’t X’s first brush with AI porn, either — it’s repeatedly had a problem moderating nude deepfakes of Taylor Swift, whether or not they are generated by Grok.

In the past, payment providers have been aggressive about cutting access to websites thought to have a significant presence of CSAM — or even legal, consensually produced sexual content. In 2020, Mastercard and Visa banned Pornhub after a New York Times article noted the prevalence of CSAM on the platform. In May 2025, Civitai was cut off by its credit card processor because “they do not wish to support platforms that allow AI-generated explicit content,” Civitai CEO Justin Maier told 404 Media. In July 2025, payment processors pressured Valve into removing adult games.

In fact, at times, financial institutions have threatened people and platforms because it seems like they didn’t want reputational risk. In 2014, adult performer Eden Alexander’s fundraiser for a hospital stay was shut down by payments company WePay because of a retweet. Also in 2014, JPMorganChase abruptly shut down several porn stars’ bank accounts. In 2021, OnlyFans briefly tried to ban sexually explicit content because banks didn’t like it. (Widespread backlash to the move quickly made OnlyFans reverse itself.) This is legal, consensual sexual content — and it was deemed too hot to handle.

But Musk’s boutique revenge porn and CSAM generator is, apparently, just fine.

It’s a striking reversal. “The industry is no longer willing to self-regulate for something as universally agreed on as the most abhorrent thing out there,” which is CSAM, says Lana Swartz, the author of New Money: How Payment Became Social Media, of the inaction by Stripe and the credit card companies.

Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, and Discover did not return requests for comment. The US Financial Coalition Against Child Sexual Exploitation — an industry group composed of payments processors, banks, and credit card companies — also did not return a request for comment. On its website, FCACSE brags that “As a result of its efforts, the use of credit cards to purchase child sexual abuse content online has been virtually eliminated globally.”

Except, of course, on X.

In the past, “people who did completely legal stuff were cut off from banks,” notes Riana Pfefferkorn, a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. There are incentives to overenforce boundaries around questionable images — and traditionally, that’s what the financial industry has done. So why is X different? It’s run by Elon Musk. “He’s the richest man in the world, he has close ties to the US government, and he’s incredibly litigious,” says Pfefferkorn. In fact, Musk has previously filed suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate; in a now-dismissed lawsuit, he claimed it illegally collected data showing an increase in hate speech after he bought the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Sexualized images of children are not the only problem with Grok’s image generation. The New York Times estimated that 1.8 million images the AI generated in a nine-day time period, or about 44 percent of posts, were sexualized images of adult women — which, depending on how explicit they are, can also be illegal to spread. Using different tools, the Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated that more than half of Grok’s images contained sexualized imagery of men, women, and children.

The explosion of sexualized images took place after Musk posted an AI-edited image of himself in a bikini on December 31st. A week later, X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, posted that the previous four days were also the highest-engagement days on X ever.

Lawyer Carrie Goldberg, whose history includes challenging Section 230 in a stalking lawsuit against Grindr and another suit that ultimately shut down chat client Omegle, is representing Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Musk’s children, in a case against X. St. Clair is one of many women Grok undressed — and now she’s suing the platform, arguing that X has created a public nuisance. “In the St. Clair case, we are only focused on xAI and Grok because they are so directly liable from our perspective,” she said in an email. “But I could envision other sources of liability.” She specifically cited distributors like Apple and Google’s app stores as areas of interest.

There are other potential legal wrinkles. In 2022, Visa was sued for offering payment services to Pornhub, because, allegedly, Visa knew Pornhub wasn’t adequately moderating CSAM. Other lawsuits followed. While the judge in the Visa case rejected the claim that Pornhub wasn’t liable because of Section 230, he also tentatively dismissed the claims against Visa in 2025, though the woman who filed suit could file an amended complaint.

“A lot of this could end up in court, and it’s going to be up to judges to make decisions about what’s ‘sexually explicit,’” says David Evan Harris, a public scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Still, 45 states have criminalized AI-generated CSAM. The federal Take It Down Act criminalizes deepfake nudes. The state of California has issued a cease and desist to Musk and X, after announcing an investigation into Grok’s images. Grok may be violating California’s deepfake porn ban — and California is just one of at least 23 states that have passed such laws.

That should matter to payment processors, because if they are knowingly transmitting money that’s the proceeds of a crime, they are engaged in money laundering — which can have serious consequences. The office of California Attorney General Rob Bonta declined to comment on whether Stripe, credit cards, or the app stores were also part of the Grok probe, citing an ongoing investigation. Money laundering laws are part of the reason financial institutions have been so leery of any website that’s been accused of containing CSAM.

X itself has ambitions to create a financial service operation, and has been licensed as a money transmitter in several states. It has also partnered with Visa on a digital wallet, and is featured as a case study by Stripe for using Stripe’s creator tools.

But X has created a situation where payment processors are hugely disincentivized to take the law seriously. That’s because any state that files suit against processors over X is likely to be attacked by Musk for “censoring” X’s right-wing base. Plus, Musk — and possibly his buddy, US President Donald Trump — could throw a lot of resources behind getting payment processors off the hook.

.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

The administration is urging Americans to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. Ms. Noem and Mr. Bovino are lying in defiance of obvious truths. They are lying in the manner of authoritarian regimes that require people to accept lies as a demonstration of power.

Even worse is that all of this feels so terribly familiar. Earlier this month, a federal agent shot and killed another Minneapolis resident, Renee Good. In that case, too, the Trump administration has demonized the victim and has blocked a state investigation of the killing.

Truth is a line of demarcation between a democratic government and an authoritarian regime. Mr. Pretti and Ms. Good are dead. The American people deserve to know what happened.

The temperature in Minneapolis is dangerously high. There is an urgent need for the federal agents deployed to the city to step back and take a breath before more Americans are hurt or killed. Those protesting the Trump administration have an equal obligation to avoid violence.

The American people also need answers about whether federal agents acted inappropriately, and the behavior of the Trump administration means that it will be impossible to trust any federal investigation that it conducts. President Trump and his appointees have demonstrated themselves to be unconcerned with truth and willing to lie to serve their own interests. Congress, therefore, must step in. The Constitution vests it with the power to hold hearings, issue subpoenas, and demand answers.

Congress ought to investigate both the circumstances of the recent killings in Minneapolis and the broader conduct of the federal agencies engaged in Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, including their treatment of peaceful protesters. The video evidence shows that the incident that ended in Mr. Pretti’s death began when a federal agent lunged at a protester and knocked her to the ground. There are many similar videos and documented instances of federal agents using unnecessary violence against people who are peacefully protesting or documenting events — both behaviors protected under the First Amendment.

Congress has the power to hold the administration accountable through its control of federal spending. A pending bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security offers a crucial opportunity to perform scrutiny and impose necessary guardrails, such as funding for body cameras.

The federal government also has sought to prevent investigations by the state of Minnesota. This must end. A federal judge in Minnesota issued a temporary restraining order on Saturday evening, at the behest of the state, barring federal agencies from destroying evidence related to Mr. Pretti’s killing. The need for such an order is both evident and extraordinary.

“The credibility of ICE and D.H.S. are at stake,” Senator Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican increasingly at odds with Mr. Trump, posted on social media on Saturday. “There must be a full joint federal and state investigation. We can trust the American people with the truth.”

The Trump administration has made no attempt to calm the waters in Minneapolis. It is a disgrace that the first public comment by Mr. Trump in the wake of Mr. Pretti’s death was to post a picture on social media of what he described as “the gunman’s gun.” Stephen Miller, arguably Mr. Trump’s most influential adviser, wrote on social media, without offering evidence, that Mr. Pretti was “an assassin.”

It is premature to reach conclusions about what exactly happened on that Minneapolis street. The Trump administration should not have done so, and we will not do so. What is clear, however, is that the federal government needs to re-establish public faith in the agencies and officers who are carrying out Mr. Trump’s crackdown on immigration. If the administration is allowed to act with impunity and avoid even the most basic accountability, the result will be more violence.

.

Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Before trees came along some 400 million years ago, our planet’s landscape was dominated by enigmatic, spire-shaped life-forms that towered more than 25 feet above the ground. Their trunklike fossils were discovered in 1843. Yet despite more than a century of speculation, scientists have struggled to answer the most basic question about Earth’s original terrestrial giants: What were they?

According to a new study, that may be because they belonged to a previously unknown branch of life.

The first person to examine this biological misfit did so in 1855, and in 1859, he dubbed it Prototaxites, which means “early yew.” The name stuck, even though experts soon realized the organism wasn’t a tree at all. Maybe it was some kind of land-based kelp or a megalithic mushroom? “It feels like it doesn’t fit comfortably anywhere,” says Matthew Nelsen, a senior research scientist at the Field Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the new study. “People have tried to shoehorn it into these different groups, but there are always things that don’t make sense.”

Over time, two main hypotheses emerged: either Prototaxites was an ancient fungus, or it fell into a category all its own. Now, after comparing fossils from these cryptic organisms with fossil fungi from the same rock deposit, the authors of the new study, published today in Science Advances, conclude that Prototaxites was likely a distinct lineage. That would place it on an equal footing with the six currently recognized kingdoms of life: those of plants, animals, fungi, protists, bacteria and archaea.

Prototaxites was composed of interwoven tubes, giving it a superficial resemblance to fungi. But the anatomical similarities end there. The researchers found that Prototaxites’ tubes branched wildly, whereas the threadlike hyphae in modern fungi follow more orderly patterns. Plus, the researchers detected no chemical trace of chitin, a polymer found in the cell walls of all living fungi and in the fossil fungi that were preserved alongside Prototaxites. “It doesn’t seem to have any of the characteristic features of the living fungal groups,” says the study’s co-lead author, Laura Cooper, a Ph.D. student at the University of Edinburgh.

This wasn’t totally unforeseen. In a 2022 paper that Nelsen co-authored with paleobotanist Kevin Boyce of Stanford University, the researchers argued that “if Prototaxites was indeed of fungal origin, it may represent part of an extinct lineage”—in other words, it already stood apart from other fungi. Boyce is agnostic about where Prototaxites truly belongs, and he isn’t prepared to cast it out of the fungal kingdom yet. But he notes that even if the organism is merely an oddball fungus, it independently evolved a unique form of complex, multicellular life. “No matter what,” Boyce says, “it’s something weird doing its own thing.”

Cooper argues Prototaxites “was so fundamentally different from the fungi we see today” that “trying to shove it in the fungi is not productive.” Whether or not this study settles the question of taxonomy, there’s much left to learn. Previous work by Boyce shows that Prototaxites probably played an ecological role much like that of fungi: consuming decayed organic matter. But little organic matter was available. In a world of ankle-high plants, these organisms grew tall as telephone poles. “How that actually works energetically,” Cooper says, “is still a complete mystery.”

.

Reconstruction of Prototaxites taiti, which could reach the height of a telephone pole, growing in the 407-million-year-old Rhynie chert ecosystem. Matt Humpage, Northern Rogue Studios

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

On Sunday, Mr. Trump said Democrats were to blame for the killings, not federal agents.

His reasoning, which he laid out on social media, was that Democrats were not cooperating with the ICE operation in Minneapolis, which has created “dangerous circumstances for EVERYONE involved.”

Daniel Altman, a former Customs and Border Protection official who served in the Trump and Biden administrations, said presidents often tried to find political advantage in moments of crisis. But he said it undermined public confidence in the investigation process to make snap judgments about motive and blame.

Mr. Altman, who oversaw internal investigations into use of force, said there were well-established procedures for such cases, including timelines for notifying Congress and the public. “Those measures are designed to promote transparency and accountability,” he said.

Shortly after Mr. Pretti was shot, officials at D.H.S. and the White House were in contact about how to respond to the incident, according to a person familiar with the communications who asked for anonymity to describe internal procedures.

The officials sought information from the ground in Minneapolis and worked with lawyers to prepare the statement issued by D.H.S. Some details were removed before the statement was published because they were still working to get a more complete picture of what happened, the person familiar with the process said.

Still, the statement claimed that Mr. Pretti “approached” officers with handgun and the “armed suspect violently resisted” when officials tried to disarm him.

Videos of the encounter show Mr. Pretti, who had a permit to carry a firearm, stepping between a woman and an agent who was pepper-spraying her. Mr. Pretti is then hit with pepper spray before a group of agents pile on to him, restraining and disarming him before the barrage of gunfire. Videos show that he never drew his weapon.

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, labeled Mr. Pretti a “domestic terrorist,” saying that was just “the facts” of the case and claiming to know his motive: “to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.”

The same day D.H.S. issued its statement, Mr. Miller and Mr. Bovino, the key architects of Mr. Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown, showed little restraint. Their social media posts are not subject to review, and their public comments are rarely carefully worded. In November, a federal judge found that Mr. Bovino had lied multiple times about federal agents’ use of force during immigration enforcement operations in Chicago.

The killing of Mr. Pretti — and the administration’s handling of the case — has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum. Democrats assailed the Trump administration and quickly signaled that they would oppose legislation to fund large parts of the government because it included $10 billion for ICE.

Major gun rights activists and groups, typically allies of Mr. Trump’s, also denounced his administration for suggesting that Mr. Pretti’s killing might have been justified because he was carrying a pistol.

Bill Essayli, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, wrote on social media, “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.” Gun Owners of America, one of the country’s largest gun advocacy groups, said in a post on social media that it condemned Mr. Essayli’s “untoward comments.”

Some Republicans in Congress also raised concerns about the shooting, a reflection of fears within the party of how backlash to the administration’s aggressive tactics could damage their political prospects in the midterm elections.

“The credibility of ICE and D.H.S. are at stake,” said Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, who also called for a “full joint federal and state investigation” into Mr. Pretti’s death. “We can trust the American people with the truth.”

poll from The New York Times and Siena University, conducted after the killing of Renee Good, the 37-year-old woman who was shot in Minneapolis by an ICE officer this month, found that roughly half of voters supported Mr. Trump’s deportations and his handling of the border with Mexico, but a sizable majority believed that ICE had gone too far.

Just 36 percent of voters said they approved of the way ICE was handling its job, according to the poll, while 63 percent disapproved — including 70 percent of independent voters. And 61 percent of voters said ICE had “gone too far” in their tactics, including nearly one in five Republicans.

By Sunday morning, even some senior Trump administration officials appeared to try to tone down some of the language. Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, dodged questions on NBC’s “Meet the Press” about whether Mr. Pretti was “brandishing a gun,” as Ms. Noem had said on Saturday.

“I do not know, and nobody else knows, either,” Mr. Blanche said. “That’s why we’re doing an investigation.”

But Mr. Bovino gave little ground in an interview on CNN, arguing that the border patrol agents were the “victims” and that Mr. Pretti had “injected himself into that law enforcement situation with a weapon.” Still, when pressed for evidence, Mr. Bovino had little to offer.

“The facts are going to come to light as to what exactly happened with an investigation,” he said.

.

The rush to blame Mr. Pretti and exonerate the immigration agents deviated entirely from the way law enforcement investigations were normally carried out.Credit…Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Bats are impressive navigators. Like so many mini submarines equipped with sonar, they deftly navigate dark forests and caves by listening for the echoes of their own calls. But how bats can tell which echo to follow while flitting around in a sea of overlapping and competing signals pinging off the myriad surfaces in their environments has been a mystery—until now.

In a new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers lay out evidence that bats find their way by listening to how their own movement changes sounds.

Imagine being at a party with hundreds or even thousands of people all talking at once; it’s difficult to make out a single speaker, explains Marc Holderied, a professor of sensory biology at the University of Bristol in England and an author of the study. That’s comparable to what a bat may be dealing with as the animal zooms around a dense forest—a chaotic environment that can make it hard to echolocate.

To solve this problem, the animals appear to rely on Doppler shift, or how a sound’s pitch changes as a bat travels.

“As the bat is moving,” Holderied says, “this Doppler shift, in this complex echo of thousands of reflectors, carries information.”

How the team reached that conclusion is an impressive and strange tale. Holderied and his colleagues observed wild pipistrelle bats using a contraption that they dubbed the “bat accelerator.” The machine is basically an eight-meter tunnel of treadmills covered in plastic leaves—about 8,000 of them all stapled on by hand, explains Athia Haron, a medical engineering research associate at the University of Manchester in England and a study co-author.

The researchers theorized that if bats picked up on the Doppler effect, then the direction that the foliage treadmill was moving in would affect how fast the animals flew.

When the treadmill moved in the direction of the bats’ flight, the critters sped up. When the foliage appeared to come toward them, however, they slowed down. “We tricked them into thinking that their speed is different,” Holderied says.

The results suggest the bats take the Doppler effect into account as they fly and use it to control their speed.

Researchers already knew of some bat species that are so-called Doppler specialists, Holderied says, but pipistrelle bats aren’t among them. The new findings indicate that the Doppler effect is used by bats that aren’t Doppler specialists.

And the bizarre experiment could help engineers enhance navigation systems for drones or self-driving cars, Haron says—something she has already begun to explore. “If that pans out, that would benefit a lot of navigation systems that fail in these kinds of cluttered environments,” she says.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

From

Click the link below the picture

.

Trinity Rodman isn’t a businesswoman—she’s a business, woman (or whatever Jay-Z said). And business is booming, okay?! 

The 23-year-old forward just signed a three-year deal with the Washington Spirit worth over $2 million annually, making her the highest-paid women’s soccer player on the planet.

The deal is historic, not just for the dollar amount (we can’t ignore that the dollar amount is looking real nice, though), but for what it represents: a seismic shift in how women’s soccer values its stars. Getting here, though, exposed tensions between the Spirit, the league’s salary cap system, and the players’ union.

Back in November, Commissioner Jessica Berman shut down Rodman’s initial contract with the Spirit, saying it violated “the spirit of the league.” The proposed deal was backloaded to work around the league’s $3.5 million salary cap, which would’ve eaten up nearly a third of the team’s entire roster budget. Instead of figuring out how to pay their biggest star what she’s worth, the league said no.

Rodman, like many Black women in her position, wasn’t backing down. Her team filed a grievance, and at the same time, European clubs were ready to pay her what the NWSL said was impossible. Faced with losing their star, the league suddenly had options they claimed didn’t exist before.

In December, the NWSL created a new “High Impact Player” rule that lets teams spend up to $1 million outside the salary cap for elite talent. Rodman became the first player to benefit. The players’ association still isn’t happy about it and filed another grievance. But at the end of the day? Trinity Rodman got her money.

“I’ve made the DMV my home and the Spirit my family, and I knew this was where I wanted to enter the next chapter of my career,” Rodman said in a statement. “I’m proud of what we’ve built since my rookie season, and I’m excited about where this club is headed.”

Rodman’s deal comes amid overall growth in NWSL attendance and media deals, and at a time when several American stars have moved to Europe.

Two million dollars makes Rodman the highest-paid player in women’s soccer. To put that in perspective, Jackie Young of the Las Vegas Aces made $252,450 last year as the WNBA’s highest-paid player. While the numbers vary significantly due to league structures, this still highlights the broader conversation around pay in women’s professional sports. The gap shows just how differently women’s leagues have handled paying their stars, even as women’s sports are breaking viewership records and signing massive media deals.

f we’re being honest here, Rodman has been carrying the Spirit since she was drafted second overall in 2021. She helped bring the team a championship as a rookie, not to mention, she’s an Olympic gold medalist and a star on the U.S. Women’s National Team. The Spirit couldn’t afford to lose her, and neither could the league. So the “High Impact Player” mechanism got created, and suddenly what seemed impossible became reality.

It’s a familiar story in women’s sports. The U.S. Women’s National Team spent years in court fighting for equal pay before reaching a settlement with U.S. Soccer in 2022. WNBA players have repeatedly had to threaten to opt out of their collective bargaining agreement to secure better salaries and working conditions. These wins don’t come from leagues voluntarily deciding to do better, but athletes who understand their value and refuse to accept anything less.

The NWSL’s media rights deals are worth 40 times what they used to be, and the league has seen consistent growth in attendance and fan engagement. The money is there, which makes Rodman’s historic contract less about what was financially possible and more about what the league was finally willing to pay. Her deal also changes the landscape for future negotiations. Other top NWSL players can now point to a seven-figure contract as proof of what’s achievable in this league, and agents have a concrete benchmark that didn’t exist before. 

Rodman secured her own future, but she also redefined what’s possible for the players coming up behind her. If you haven’t already, it’s time to start planning those trips to Washington, D.C. to see Rodman live and up close, now!

.

LOS ANGELES, CA – JANUARY 22: Trinity Rodman of the United States announces her re-signing with her club team, the Washington Spirit, during a press conference at BMO Stadium on January 22, 2026, in Los Angeles , California. (Photo by Brad Smith/ISI Photos/USSF/Getty Images)

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Donald Trump’s most profound break with American democracy, evident in his words and actions alike, is his view that the state’s relationship with its citizens is defined not by ideals or rules but rather by expressions of power, at the personal direction of the president. That has been clear enough for years, but I had not truly seen what it looked like in person until I arrived in Minneapolis, my hometown, to witness what Trump’s Department of Homeland Security called Operation Metro Surge.

On Jan. 14, at 7:44 p.m., eight hours after I got to town, the City of Minneapolis’s official X account announced that there were “reports of a shooting involving federal law enforcement in North Minneapolis.” “Federal law enforcement,” as everyone by then knew, meant one of the 3,000 immigration agents fanned out across the metropolitan area, which Minneapolitans invariably called “ICE”: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency at the vanguard of the surge.

They had been there since December, ostensibly in relation to a fraud investigation that fell well out of their departmental purview and settled instead for what appeared outwardly as a more indiscriminate pursuit of potential immigration violations. The Minneapolis metro area is not big: Hennepin and Ramsey Counties — home to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, respectively, and many of their suburbs — are together less than one-fifth the size of Los Angeles County, the target of the administration’s first such immigration crackdown last year.

It is also home to a population of urban progressives who had thrown themselves into the task of tracking federal agents. The city had become a giant eyeball, every exercised citizen’s smartphone a sort of retinal photoreceptor for the optic nerve of neighborhood channels on the encrypted messaging app Signal, scanning public spaces for signs of ICE.

In the heightened atmosphere of the moment, the lines between documentation and confrontation had grown blurry. ICE officers, when they stuck around anywhere for more than a few minutes, were likely to be met by not just one or two camera-wielding observers but many, and observation inevitably turned into protest. The latent combustibility of these encounters was visible in the footage that bystanders had captured of an ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, fatally shooting a resident, Renee Good, in her car on a snowy street in South Minneapolis on Jan. 7. That combustibility would be visible again in the fatal shooting on Jan. 24 of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old V.A. hospital registered nurse, by Border Patrol agents.

Shock over the violence of the deployment quickly gave way to redoubled anger. Within minutes of the city’s X post on Jan. 14, a crowd of perhaps a hundred people from all over the metro area had assembled at the location, in the Hawthorne neighborhood on Minneapolis’s north side, where, according to an F.B.I. agent’s affidavit, an ICE agent had shot an undocumented immigrant in the leg after being attacked with a broom during an arrest. When I arrived, several blocks were cordoned off with crime-scene tape, and milling around in the darkness beyond it were federal agents in balaclavas and tactical gear, most of them identified by their patches as members of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations unit.

The agents, in their masks and military-style kit, suggested a fierce omnipotence, but ICE and the other agencies have just as often been visibly unprepared to handle the policing situations their presence created in the city — or even the weather. Across the intersection, an agent slipped on the icy pavement and then fled, leaving an unsecured magazine full of live ammunition on the street, to the jeers of the crowd. Nearer to where I stood, an unmarked black Jeep Grand Cherokee was struggling to get clear of the crowd, escorted by a few officers on foot. “Get out of my [expletive] street!” someone yelled.

A woman in a fur-ruffed parka swung a plastic post at the rear windshield of the vehicle, which shattered with a dull crunch. It was not long before the air was alive with smoke grenades and sting balls and thick with tear gas. Faces peered out of second-floor windows along what had been, less than an hour earlier, a quiet residential street. “You killed Renee Good!” a man bellowed.

The atmosphere was strange and unstable for a street protest, missing some important steps of the usual choreography, and it took me a moment to realize why: I saw no police officers. I had passed a Minneapolis Police Department cruiser parked some distance down the street, but here, where the agents were clashing with the crowd, they were nowhere to be seen. The federal agents themselves looked more like a platoon of soldiers navigating a hostile foreign capital than conventional law enforcement in an American city.

For weeks, these agents had been actors in a kind of theater of power, meting out various forms of state force and violence, framed by the smartphone cameras they carried, providing a steady stream of content for the Trump administration’s various social media platforms. What was clear in person, seeing the scene outside of the frame, were the limits of this performance of power. The agents had no capacity to maintain order or much apparent interest in doing so. Their presence was a vector of chaos, and controlling it was not in their job description. All that was holding the crowd back, as far as I could tell, was the knowledge that an officer like these shot a woman a week earlier and that another shot a man up the street an hour ago. I left the scene that night, certain it would happen again.

‘Take Out That Phone and Hit Record’

Tim Walz, Minnesota’s embattled governor, appeared live on camera from his official residence on the night of the second shooting and clash. He described the federal deployment to his state as an “occupation” and “a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.”

.

Federal agents stormed the city

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article (sound on to listen):

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

In an Indonesian cave system known for its prehistoric art, the oldest cave art yet found was hiding in plain sight. In a cave full of paintings that were well studied over the years, a faint hand stencil on the ceiling had been overlooked. A new chemical analysis of the stencil reveals that it dates back at least 67,800 years, an astonishing 15,000 years older than the next-oldest cave art found on the same island, Sulawesi. A nearby stencil dated to about 60,900 years ago.

“We knew that they were probably going to be old…, but we didn’t know how old,” says study co-author Maxime Aubert of Griffith University in Australia.

The record-breaking finding, published today in Nature, might provide valuable information about the first humans to reach Australia.

The researchers used lasers—instead of the typical drilling—to take samples to date the art. This let them test more areas and therefore get a more accurate date range than they would have able to obtain with older methods.

The age of this previously undiscovered artwork is “really astonishing,” says Franco Viviani, a physical anthropologist who was not involved in the new study. Viviani adds that shifting back the time line of cave art gives us new insights into what ancient societies were capable of. “They confirm what is known today: that art is positively correlated to critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills,” he says.

Scientists were already aware of the ability of early humans and other ancient hominins to create art, such as shell jewelry made by humans at least 70,000 years ago and 57,000-year-old engraved bones attributed to Neandertals. Still, the cave art in the new study is among the oldest evidence yet of paintings by modern humans, and its distinctive style gives a view into the minds of the people who created it.

Consistent with a style that has, so far, only been found on Sulawesi, the hand is depicted with pointy, clawlike fingers. Researchers believe the style might serve to emphasize the close connection between humans and animals, which is “something we already seem to see in the very early painted art of Sulawesi, with at least one instance of a scene portraying figures that we interpret as representations of part-human, part-animal beings,” said study co-author Adam Brumm of Griffith University in a statement.

These clues about the culture of the people who created this art are especially interesting to researchers because they might shed light on the lives of the first humans to migrate to Australia. Archeologists have long suspected that Australia’s first settlers traveled through Indonesia, but because of uncertainties in DNA and archeological evidence that has been discovered to date, they have debated whether this happened 65,000 or 50,000 years ago. The presence of such old art suggests humans likely made their way to the continent even earlier, possibly managing to undertake the first intentional long-distance sea crossing.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________