curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
Carolyn Y. Johnson @ NY Times:
In an $80 Motel Room, a Discovery to Shed Light on the Origins of Life
A scrappy science project led to a significant discovery: two new species of a rare organism that could elucidate a fundamental transition in the history of life on our planet.
On a spring day last year, Andrew Willoughby drove three and a half hours to a cheap motel in Nags Head, N.C. From the parking lot, he texted a stranger he had met online.
Julia Van Etten appeared, ushering him past a “Do Not Disturb” sign into one of the motel’s $80 rooms, which she had secretly turned into a makeshift lab. Jugs of brackish water lined the walls. Buckets overflowed with hunks of marsh grass. Bedside tables served as microscope stands.
“Oh my god, these people are legit,” Dr. Willoughby, a biologist who studies plant genomes, thought to himself as he found a spot to sit on the corner of the bed.
Over the next few days, a small group of scientists led by Dr. Van Etten, an evolutionary biologist, scoured drops of water for swamp algae. The team — brought together, in part, by disruptions and despair over the Trump administration’s freezes to federal science funding — then made an exciting discovery.
In the Journal of Phycology, Dr. Van Etten and her colleagues describe their motel-room find: two new species of a single-celled organism called Paulinella, a scaly, grenade-shaped microbe with sausage-shaped green lumps inside. Their discovery brings the world’s known total of photosynthetic Paulinella species to six.
What makes Paulinella important to biologists? Almost all complex photosynthetic life on Earth, from redwood trees to ferns to algae, traces back to an event 1.5 billion years ago. …
(Carolyn Y. Johnson @ NY Times more…)
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Broad Daylight News:
The Evidence Says Segregation Can Return.More than 50 desegregation cases just got dismissed. A 2024 study on what happens next should worry everyone.
… doesn’t mean federal oversight should last forever. It means the age of an order cannot itself be the reason for ending it. The legal standard already requires something much stronger: a district seeking release is supposed to show it has eliminated the vestiges of the old dual system to the extent practicable. Courts traditionally examine student assignment, faculty, staff, transportation, extracurricular activities, and facilities, while other measures of equal educational opportunity can also matter. The question was never whether a consent decree is sixty years old. It’s whether the conditions that justified federal intervention have actually been eliminated, and whether they’ll stay eliminated once federal oversight disappears.
(Broad Daylight News more…)
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ReligiousLiberty.TV:
Can a president quietly erase an Act of Congress with a courtroom handshake?“We agree with the plaintiffs. Sign this order telling the IRS never to enforce the Johnson Amendment against these churches during Sunday services.”
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Mitch Jackson:
Federal law has banned taxpayer-funded propaganda for 75 years. The White House is airing it anyway, weeks before the midterms, and the people who could stop it are silent.
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Marcus Schuler:
OpenAI and Anthropic Probe Tens of Thousands of Incidents as OpenAI Halts TrainingMike Allen @ Axios:
Tens of thousands of AI lapses
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Brian Allen:
Two Attempts to Indict Anti-ICE Protesters Failed. A Prosecutor Says Trump’s U.S. Attorney Ordered Her to Keep Pushing
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Jesse Bedayn, Sarah Rankin @ Associated Press:
Texas city council candidate who protested ICE shooting faces ‘riot participation’ chargeBrant Bingamon, Sammie Seamon @ Austin Chronicle:
Misael Ramos Details Harrowing Arrest for Protesting ICE
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Romaric Jannel, PhD:
Critical Thinking: A False Claim and a Lie Are Not the Same Thing
A field guide to claims
Last Days in Two Nations
Climate.us
formerly Climate.gov
Climate Solutions Explorer
Have I Been Flocked?
Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting
resources tracking the “Andes” hantavirus outbreak
Apocalypse Early Warning System
Al Jazeera Death toll and injuries live tracker
Mike Ludwig @ truthout: ICE Says 51 People Died in Custody Under Trump. Experts Say That’s an Undercount.
ICE Accountability Project
Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, Ximena Bustillo, Jasmine Garsd @ NPR: Deaths of migrants in ICE custody hit record high under Trump
- September 18: Carlos Josue Marchena Marchena
- August 31: Pierre Damas Bel
- August 1: Edwin Lopez-Cornejo
- July 19: Jose Chajon-Raxon
- July 14: Juan Jairo Coronilla Duran
- July 13: Joan Sebastian Guerrero
- July 7: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo
- June 4: Mamuka Artmeladze
- April 16: Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt
- March 25: Jose Guadalupe Ramos-Solano
- March 16: Royer Perez-Jimenez
- March 14: Naseer Paktiawil
- February 25: Nurul Amin Shah Alam
April 1 – Jennifer Peltz and Jake Offenhartz @ AP: Death of a refugee left at a Buffalo doughnut shop by Border Patrol is ruled a homicide - January 24: Alex Pretti
- January 14: Heber Sanchaz Dominguez
- January 14: Victor Manuel Diaz
- January 9: Parady La
- January 7: Renée Good
- January 6: Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz
- January 5: Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres
- January 3: Geraldo Lunas Campos
- December 31, 2025: Keith Porter
Suffering Under President Obama
NACDL Criminal Case Tracker
Texas Tribune: A Walk for Peace: photos of Fort Worth monks’ journey to Washington
Walk for Peace – Dhammacetiya – The Ancient Sacred Buddhist Scripture Stupas
Margaret Chase Smith: Declaration of Conscience
NPR: January 6, 2021: A visual archive
Accountability Initiative ICE List
GriftMatrix
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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