And then there were two…
The guru made famous by some viral moments on the 2020 debate stage will turn to promoting her new book this spring.
Marianne Williamson has suspended her campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination after coming in second in the South Carolina primary with just 2 percent of the vote.
The self-help author challenged President Joe Biden from the left — adopting most of the last presidential platform of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — but Williamson struggled with raising money and a lack of organization. Her campaign is in debt, and more than one dozen disgruntled staffers have been left in its wake.
...During the course of Williamson’s campaign, she went through four campaign managers, of whom Carlos Cardona, a local New Hampshire pol, had the longest tenure. He announced his departure from the campaign after the New Hampshire primary when Williamson got 4 percent of the vote.
“I read a quote the other day that said sunsets are proof that endings can be beautiful too,” Williamson said in a video message to supporters ending her campaign. “And so today, even though it is time to suspend my campaign for the presidency, I do want to see the beauty.”...
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...Gallagher ultimately voted no, which Republican leaders accepted since they could lose three votes to launch the first impeachment of the 118th Congress. But minutes later, the vote arrived at a 215-215 tie, an unexpected turn of events that stunned the House floor into a standstill.
Soon, the Wisconsin Republican was swarmed on the House floor by his colleagues, who engaged in an apparent last-ditch attempt to change his mind. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has tried multiple times to force the House to expedite impeaching Mayorkas, was spotted shouting at Gallagher. She was soon joined by Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee who spearheaded the investigation into Mayorkas. Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Tex.), a close ally of Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.), then animatedly tried to persuade Gallagher to flip his vote as Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) listened in.
As the vote stayed open after time had expired, Democrats shouted “Order! Order” in unison to bring the tied vote to a close. Gallagher stood listening with his arms folded across his chest as he intermittently gesticulated and shook his head. He was unmoved.
...Walking off the House floor after another vote on a measure he proposed to fund Israel failed, Johnson simply said “yes” when asked if he would bring the Mayorkas impeachment vote back up once enough Republicans were present to vote. Asked what he would do to win over the three no votes, Johnson ignored the question, but Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) cheekily said “pray.”
Take a moment and say THANK YOU to Rep Al Green by making a donation on his ACTBLUE page.
The father of the murdered teenager Brianna Ghey has demanded Rishi Sunak apologise after the prime minister made a jibe at the expense of transgender people just after being told Brianna’s mother was watching him in the House of Commons.
After the exchanges, at prime minister’s questions, Brianna’s father, Peter Spooner, called Sunak’s comments “absolutely dehumanising”.
“For the prime minister of our country to come out with degrading comments like he did, regardless of them being in relation to discussions in parliament, they are absolutely dehumanising,” he told Sky News. “Identities of people should not be used in that manner, and I personally feel shocked by his comments and feel he should apologise for his remarks.”
A series of Conservative MPs also rounded on Sunak for insensitivity after he pressed ahead with an apparently prepared attack line about transgender people, just after being told by Keir Starmer that Esther Ghey was in the public gallery.
In a D.C. courtroom, a trial is wrapping up this week with big stakes for climate science. One of the world's most prominent climate scientists is suing a right wing author and a policy analyst for defamation.
The case comes at a time when attacks on scientists are proliferating, says Peter Hotez, professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology at Baylor College of Medicine. Even as misinformation about scientists and their work keeps growing, Hotez says scientists haven't yet found a good way to respond.
...The trial in D.C. Superior Court involves posts from right wing author Mark Steyn and policy analyst Rand Simberg. In an online post, Simberg compared Mann to former Penn State Football coach Jerry Sandusky, a convicted child sex abuser. Simberg wrote that Mann was the "Sandusky of climate science" writing that Mann "molested and tortured data." Steyn called Mann's research fraudulent.
Mann sued the two men for defamation...
...Imran Ahmed, chief executive at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, says any response has to include social media companies as that's where attacks on scientists happen every day. Research finds that social media platforms can encourage the spread of scientific and medical misinformation.
Hotez says he and Mann are working on an upcoming project, collaborating on what they see as overlap in attacks on climate science and biomedicine, and how to counter it.
...The Sage investigation found that all but one of the study authors, including the lead author on each study, were affiliated with at least one of the anti-abortion associations Charlotte Lozier Institute, Elliot Institute, and American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The AAPLOG is listed as a plaintiff in the mifepristone lawsuit. One of the peer reviewers was also associated with Charlotte Lozier. None of the authors or the reviewer disclosed these affiliations.
Since all three studies had the same lead author, Sage carried out an independent post-publication peer review of the data in all three studies. Two subject matter experts determined that the 2021 and 2022 articles, which use the same dataset, had “fundamental problems with the study design and methodology, unjustified or incorrect factual assumptions, material errors in the authors’ analysis of the data, and misleading presentations of the data.”
...Kacsmaryk ruled in April that mifepristone had been improperly approved and should be yanked from the U.S. market. The Department of Justice appealed the decision, first to the Fifth Circuit Court, which only partially stayed the ruling. The Justice Department then appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which issued a temporary stay while the lawsuit plays out. The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case next month.
Environmental Protection Agency sets lower limits on fine particle pollution, estimated to cause 85,000 to 225,000 deaths annually
The Environmental Protection Agency has finalized long-awaited new limits on soot, the tiny air pollution particles emitted by sources as varied as power plants, factories, car exhaust and wildfires.
“Today’s action is a critical step forward that will better protect workers, families and communities from the dangerous and costly impacts of fine particle pollution,” the EPA administrator, Michael Regan, told reporters on Tuesday.
Also known as fine particle pollution, soot is one of the nation’s most widespread air pollutants. It is also one of the most dangerous, causing an estimated 85,000 to 200,000 excess US deaths annually; the tiny particles can become lodged in human lungs and sometimes even enter the bloodstream, triggering asthma attacks, cancer, and heart and lung disease.
The strengthened pollution controls, unveiled on Wednesday, will lower the annual soot standard to 9 micrograms per cubic meter of air, down from the previous standard of 12 micrograms.
...Using an artificial intelligence system they developed, the study authors scanned the entire collection of proteins produced by SARS-CoV-2 and then performed an exhaustive series of validation experiments. The scientists found that certain viral protein fragments, generated after the SARS-CoV-2 virus is broken down into pieces, can mimic a key component of the body’s machinery for amplifying immune signals. Their discoveries suggest that some of the most serious COVID-19 outcomes can result from these fragments overstimulating the immune system, thereby causing rampant inflammation in widely different contexts such as cytokine storms and lethal blood coagulation.
...“What we found deviates from the standard picture of viral infection,” said Wong, who is also a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. “The textbooks tell us that after the virus is destroyed, the sick host ‘wins,’ and different pieces of virus can be used to train the immune system for future recognition. COVID-19 reminds us that it’s not this simple.
...“We saw that the various forms of debris from the destroyed virus can reassemble into these biologically active ‘zombie’ complexes,” Wong said. “It is interesting that the human peptide being imitated by the viral fragments has been implicated in rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and lupus, and that different aspects of COVID-19 are reminiscent of these autoimmune conditions.”
Funny how pollster John Zogby continues to claim he’s a Democrat, while his polling always seems to skew (very helpfully) Republican...
John Zogby Strategies has banked nearly $300,000 working for the anti-vax conspiracy theorist.
In early December, John Zogby, a prominent American pollster, appeared on Sky News Australia, as he occasionally does, to chat about the latest developments in the US presidential campaign. He noted that it was bad news for Biden: “I haven’t seen one published poll in the states or, for that matter, nationwide, including my own unpublished polls in the battleground states, where Joe Biden is where he needs to be… Joe Biden is not in good shape heading into 2024.”
Zogby was encouraging about another presidential candidate: Robert Kennedy Jr. He pointed out, “Bobby Kennedy is out there. And even with terrible press that he’s getting, Bobby Kennedy is about 20, 22 percent nationwide, actually 24, 25 percent in some of the battleground states. So this thing is complex this year. Remember, 73 percent don’t want Biden or Trump to be running.”
As he provided his analysis, which jibed with other political commentators, Zogby left out an important piece of data: His firm has been working for Kennedy, who is running as an independent.
...On February 2, Zogby was again on Sky News Australia. He said that a recent Quinnipiac poll showing Biden ahead of Trump by 6 points in a national match-up might be an outlier. When the host asked whether Kennedy would draw votes from Biden or Trump, Zogby replied, “There are things that Bobby Kennedy says that are appealing to the right, particularly the lack of trust in government and institutions. On the other hand, Bobby Kennedy [is a] longtime successful environmental lawyer and the scion of a scion of a Democratic family. Our polls are showing that Bobby Kennedy is actually drawing equally from Trump’s and Biden’s supporters.” That point is useful for Kennedy, who does not want to be labelled a spoiler.
Zogby said nothing about Kennedy’s crusade against vaccinations or his promotion of conspiracy theories. Once more, he did not mention his firm’s tie to the Kennedy campaign.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN’S Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is a centerpiece of his first term — and a huge windfall for New York. The state is expected to receive $36 billion from the law to upgrade its transportation system, a once-in-a-generation gift.
Biden hailed the 2021 law as a chance to “transform our transportation system” and “turn the climate crisis into an opportunity.” Much of the money was dedicated to public transit and will fund marquee projects like the Second Avenue Subway expansion. But a giant pot was left to states to decide how to spend — either on maintaining and widening roads, or, with federal sign-off, on climate-friendly infrastructure like subways, trains, and sidewalks.
So far, Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration has overwhelmingly chosen the former.
By August 2023, the state Department of Transportation had spent over $1 billion in infrastructure law “flexible funds” that could have gone to either roads or climate-friendly projects. Over 90 percent went to roads, and less than one percent to projects primarily focused on public transportation, according to data compiled by the nonprofit Green New Deal Network and reviewed by New York Focus. (Some of the road projects did include non-car elements like bike paths and bus shelters.)
Almost 2,000 years ago, a volcano preserved Herculaneum’s vast library of scrolls but left them unreadable. A volunteer army of nerds has been racing to decipher them.
...The reason we don’t know exactly what’s in the Herculaneum papyri is, y’know, volcano. The scrolls were preserved by the voluminous amount of superhot mud and debris that surrounded them, but the knock-on effects of Mount Vesuvius charred them beyond recognition. The ones that have been excavated look like leftover logs in a doused campfire. People have spent hundreds of years trying to unroll them—sometimes carefully, sometimes not. And the scrolls are brittle. Even the most meticulous attempts at unrolling have tended to end badly, with them crumbling into ashy pieces.
In recent years, efforts have been made to create high-resolution, 3D scans of the scrolls’ interiors, the idea being to unspool them virtually. This work, though, has often been more tantalizing than revelatory. Scholars have been able to glimpse only snippets of the scrolls’ innards and hints of ink on the papyrus. Some experts have sworn they could see letters in the scans, but consensus proved elusive, and scanning the entire cache is logistically difficult and prohibitively expensive for all but the deepest-pocketed patrons. Anything on the order of words or paragraphs has long remained a mystery.
But Friedman wasn’t your average Rome-loving dad. He was the chief executive officer of GitHub Inc., the massive software development platform that Microsoft Corp. acquired in 2018. Within GitHub, Friedman had been developing one of the first coding assistants powered by artificial intelligence, and he’d seen the rising power of AI firsthand. He had a hunch that AI algorithms might be able to find patterns in the scroll images that humans had missed.
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The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, jeremybloom, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) eeff, Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw