Fogbow

Rare 7-foot fish washed ashore on Oregon’s coast garners worldwide attention

Updated 11:13 PM CEST, June 7, 2024

GEARHART, Ore. (AP) — A massive rare fish thought to only live in temperate waters in the southern hemisphere has washed up on Oregon’s northern coast, drawing crowds of curious onlookers intrigued by the unusual sight.

The 7.3-foot (2.2 meter) hoodwinker sunfish first appeared on the beach in Gearhart on Monday, the Seaside Aquarium said in a media release. It was still on the beach on Friday and may remain there for weeks, the aquarium said, as it is difficult for scavengers to puncture its tough skin.

Photos provided by the aquarium showed a flat, round, gray fish lying on its side in the sand. Photos of a person kneeling next to it, and another of a pickup truck parked next to it, gave a sense of its large scale and size.

The stir it has created on social media prompted a New Zealand-based researcher who has studied sunfish to contact the aquarium. After looking at photographs of the fish, Marianne Nyegaard was able to confirm that it was indeed a hoodwinker sunfish — rarer than the more common ocean sunfish — and said she believed it may be the largest such fish ever sampled, according to the aquarium.

In research published in 2017, Nyegaard discovered through genetic sampling and observation that the hoodwinker sunfish, or Mola tecta, was a different species than the ocean sunfish, Mola mola. “Tecta” in Latin means hidden or disguised, referring to a new species that had been “hiding in plain sight,” the aquarium said.



https://apnews.com/article/oregon-beach ... 2498773c13

Napa Valley has lush vineyards and wineries – and a pollution problem
Reports and emails show a landfill at the top of a hill is leaching dangerous toxins into the Napa River

Shannon Kelleher, The New Lede
Sun 9 Jun 2024 17.00 CEST

Famous for its lush vineyards and cherished local wineries, Napa valley is where people go to escape their problems.

“When you first get there, it’s really pretty,” said Geoff Ellsworth, former mayor of St Helena, a small Napa community nestled 50 miles north-east of San Francisco. “It mesmerizes people.”

What the more than 3 million annual tourists don’t see, however, is that California’s wine country has a brewing problem – one that has spurred multiple ongoing government investigations and created deep divisions. Some residents and business owners fear it poses a risk to the region’s reputation and environment.

At the heart of the fear is the decades-old Clover Flat Landfill (CFL), perched on the northern edge of the valley atop the edge of a rugged mountain range. Two streams run adjacent to the landfill as tributaries to the Napa River.

A growing body of evidence, including regulatory inspection reports and emails between regulators and CFL owners, suggests the landfill and a related garbage-collection business have routinely polluted those local waterways that drain into the Napa River with an assortment of dangerous toxins.

The river irrigates the valley’s beloved vineyards and is used recreationally for kayaking by more than 10,000 people annually. The prospect that the water and wine flowing from the region may be at risk of contamination with hazardous chemicals and heavy metals has driven a wedge between those speaking out about the concerns and others who want the issue kept out of the spotlight, according to Ellsworth, a former employee of CFL.

“The Napa valley is amongst the most high-value agricultural land in the country,” he said. “If there’s a contamination issue, the economic ripples are significant.”


https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... s-wineries

Our latest research suggests that some ancient viral DNA sequences in the human genome play a role in susceptibility to psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder.

Hervs represent the remnants of these infections with ancient retroviruses. Retroviruses are viruses that insert a copy of their genetic material into the DNA of the cells they infect. Retroviruses probably infected us on multiple occasions during our evolutionary past. When these infections occurred in sperm or egg cells that generated offspring, the genetic material from these retroviruses was passed on to subsequent generations, becoming a permanent part of our lineage.

Put The Telly On @putthetellyon wrote: Dick Van-Dyke, 98, is going to live until he’s 180. This is his world and we’re just living in it.

The big British bamboo crisis: ‘It invaded my beautiful home’
The plant can punch through paving stones, asphalt and even the foundations of your house. In one case, the bill for damage reached £100,000. So why does this problem just keep on growing?

By Simon Usborne
Tue 11 Jun 2024 06.00 CEST

Isobel Chetwood moved to her dream home on her birthday just over a decade ago. As she wound up a 40-year career in the NHS as a GP practice manager in Stockport, Greater Manchester, she was keen to return to her roots in Cheshire. She settled in a comfortable house in the quiet village of Plumley.

Chetwood, 68, lives alone. When she moved in, she found a gardener (“I don’t do dirt down me fingernails,” she says, laughing). He made her a raised bed for growing strawberries, alongside a fence that divided her garden from her neighbour’s. “It was beautiful out there,” she says.

All was well until – a little over two years ago – alien shoots began rising like spears from the soil around her strawberry plants, having somehow found a way through the heavy railway sleepers and bricks used to build the bed.


https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... tiful-home

Microplastics found in every human semen sample tested in study
Chinese scientists say further research on potential harm to reproduction from contamination is ‘imperative’

Damian Carrington Environment editor
Mon 10 Jun 2024 14.39 CEST

Microplastic pollution has been found in all human semen samples tested in a study, and researchers say further research on the potential harm to reproduction is “imperative”.

Sperm counts in men have been falling for decades and 40% of low counts remain unexplained, although chemical pollution has been implicated by many studies.

The 40 semen samples were from healthy men undergoing premarital health assessments in Jinan, China. Another recent study found microplastics in the semen of six out of 10 healthy young men in Italy, and another study in China found the pollutants in half of 25 samples.

Recent studies in mice have reported that microplastics reduced sperm count and caused abnormalities and hormone disruption.

Research on microplastics and human health is moving quickly and scientists appear to be finding the contaminants everywhere. The pollutants were found in all 23 human testicle samples tested in a study published in May.

Microplastics have also recently been discovered in human blood, placentas and breast milk, indicating widespread contamination of people’s bodies. The impact on health is as yet unknown but microplastics have been shown to cause damage to human cells in the laboratory.



https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... nese-study

Revealed: drug cartels force migrant children to work as foot soldiers in Europe’s booming cocaine trade
Exclusive: Guardian investigation shows white powder trail linking hundreds of vulnerable African minors with ruthless gangs

Words by Mark Townsend. Data and visuals by Ana Lucía González Paz, Lucy Swan and Harvey Symons
Tue 11 Jun 2024 13.00 CEST

Hundreds of unaccompanied child migrants across Europe are being forced to work as soldiers for increasingly powerful drug cartels to meet the continent’s soaring appetite for cocaine, a Guardian investigation has found.

EU police forces have warned of industrial-scale exploitation of African children by cocaine networks operating in western Europe in cities including Paris and Brussels as they seek to expand Europe’s £10bn cocaine market.

Child protection agencies warned that cocaine gangs, which are exploiting the “unlimited” supply of vulnerable African children at their disposal, are using brutal means to control their victims, including torture and rape if they fail to sell enough drugs.

Sources told the Guardian that London may be next after police recently found a number of Moroccan and Algerian children, seemingly victims of torture, who they believe were trafficked into the country by cocaine gangs.

Concern over the level of exploitation was so great that in March, EU police forces – along with UK and UN agencies and Europol – met to discuss how to tackle the exploitation and trafficking of African children by drugs networks based in western Europe.

A separate recent assessment by EU police forces investigating serious organised crime and human trafficking concluded: “Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and France presented several concrete cases of the exploitation of hundreds of north African minors, recruited by drug trafficking networks to sell narcotics.”



https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... use-europe

The sad, stupid rise of the sigma male: how toxic masculinity took over social media
His heroes are Patrick Bateman, John Wick, Tommy Shelby and Walter White. He follows Andrew Tate and idolises wolves. And he has quickly become a laughing stock. Welcome to the world of the sigma male

Steve Rose
Wed 12 Jun 2024 11.00 CEST

You are a lone wolf. You are an independent thinker who makes his own rules. You are confident and competent. Women are drawn to you, but you don’t really care about them. Your day begins at 4.30am with a cold shower, followed by a punishing workout and an even more punishing skincare routine. You shun conventional career paths and run your own business, probably in crypto or real estate or vigilante crime fighting. You are that rarest of males – you are a sigma.

Either that or you’re a bemused bystander who has had a hard time avoiding content about sigma males and the “sigma grindset”. In the past few years, sigma masculinity has blown up. It’s all over social media – and it’s helped define what could be a masculine archetype for our times, supposedly exemplified by characters played by the likes of Keanu Reeves, Cillian Murphy, Bryan Cranston and Christian Bale, plus the manosphere influencer Andrew Tate as well as actual, real life wolves.


https://www.theguardian.com/society/art ... cial-media

Far-right Republicans’ latest target? No-fault divorce
If a certain subsection of Republicans get their way, obtaining a divorce in the US might soon become a lot more difficult

Arwa Mahdawi
Sat 15 Jun 2024 15.00 CEST

Republicans want to make it harder to get a divorce

They’ve come after abortion. They’ve come after birth control. They’ve come after IVF. Now it looks suspiciously like far-right Republicans might have a new target: no-fault divorce. If a certain subsection of Republicans get their way, obtaining a divorce in the US might soon become a lot more difficult.

No-fault divorce laws, in which either party can unilaterally get a divorce without having to prove the other person did something egregious, were first instituted in California in 1969 by the then governor, Ronald Reagan (who went on to become the first US president who had ever been divorced). By 2010 every state in the country had legalized a no-fault divorce option. The change in law seemed like common sense: before the shift, couples who no longer wanted to be together had to make up scenarios where someone was at fault, even sometimes faking adultery, to get a court to agree to let them split. And while it certainly wasn’t Reagan’s intention at the time, no-fault divorces were also a feminist act: they made it easier for women (and it usually was women) in abusive relationships to get out.

Want to know just how good for American women no-fault divorces were? A National Bureau of Economic Research study conducted in 2003, found a large decline in the number of women killing themselves following the introduction of no-fault divorce, but no similar decline for men. “Total female suicide declined by around 20% in states that adopted unilateral divorce,” according to the paper. There was also “a large decline in domestic violence for both men and women in states that adopted unilateral divorce … [and] suggestive evidence that unilateral divorce led to a decline in females murdered by their partners”.



https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... lt-divorce

She was convicted of murder in 1981. A judge just ruled her innocent.
Sandra Hemme was sentenced to life for the murder of Patricia Jeschke. The Innocence Project says this is the longest known wrongful conviction of a U.S. woman.

By Kyle Melnick
June 16, 2024 at 9:37 a.m. EDT

When Missouri police were searching for a suspect in a gruesome killing in 1980, they interviewed Sandra Hemme, a 20-year-old psychiatric patient, Hemme’s attorneys said. But Hemme was so heavily medicated during some of the conversations that she couldn’t hold her head up and needed to be strapped to a chair, according to her attorneys.

Hemme’s statements, her attorneys said, conflicted with information police found in the killing of Patricia Jeschke, whose hands were tied behind her back with a telephone cord when her body was found in her St. Joseph, Mo., home. Hemme ultimately told police that she killed Jeschke.

But the Innocence Project, a nonprofit that aims to exonerate people who it says were wrongfully convicted, said it filed a petition in the Livingston County Circuit Court last year, arguing that police exploited Hemme’s mental health and pressured her into making false statements, leading her to be wrongly imprisoned in 1981 on a life sentence that she’s still serving.

Late Friday, a judge overturned Hemme’s conviction, saying that she presented evidence of her innocence and must be freed within 30 days unless prosecutors retry her, according to the Associated Press. Whether Hemme will be retried or promptly released from prison is unclear; the Missouri attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Innocence Project said Hemme’s more than 43 years behind bars has been the longest known wrongful conviction of a woman in U.S. history. Prison records showed Hemme, 64, was being held at the Chillicothe Correctional Center in Chillicothe, Mo., as of Saturday night.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... a-jeschke/

How to Stop Cops From "Seeing Through Walls" to Spy on Your Home!

Hampton Law
17 Jun 2024

Can Cops See Through The Walls Of Your Home to Spy On YOU? Is This Legal? In this video, we break down new technology that allows police to see through the walls of your home and other buildings to conduct criminal investigations and how they have been able to do this for years without any court rulings.

We also give you a sneak peek into HOW TO STOP THIS TECHNOLOGY FROM BEING USED AGAINST YOU TO INVADE YOUR PRIVACY!

RTH10260 wrote: ↑Sun Jun 16, 2024 1:18 pm

She was convicted of murder in 1981. A judge just ruled her innocent.
Sandra Hemme was sentenced to life for the murder of Patricia Jeschke. The Innocence Project says this is the longest known wrongful conviction of a U.S. woman.

By Kyle Melnick
June 16, 2024 at 9:37 a.m. EDT

When Missouri police were searching for a suspect in a gruesome killing in 1980, they interviewed Sandra Hemme, a 20-year-old psychiatric patient, Hemme’s attorneys said. But Hemme was so heavily medicated during some of the conversations that she couldn’t hold her head up and needed to be strapped to a chair, according to her attorneys.

Hemme’s statements, her attorneys said, conflicted with information police found in the killing of Patricia Jeschke, whose hands were tied behind her back with a telephone cord when her body was found in her St. Joseph, Mo., home. Hemme ultimately told police that she killed Jeschke.

But the Innocence Project, a nonprofit that aims to exonerate people who it says were wrongfully convicted, said it filed a petition in the Livingston County Circuit Court last year, arguing that police exploited Hemme’s mental health and pressured her into making false statements, leading her to be wrongly imprisoned in 1981 on a life sentence that she’s still serving.

Late Friday, a judge overturned Hemme’s conviction, saying that she presented evidence of her innocence and must be freed within 30 days unless prosecutors retry her, according to the Associated Press. Whether Hemme will be retried or promptly released from prison is unclear; the Missouri attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Innocence Project said Hemme’s more than 43 years behind bars has been the longest known wrongful conviction of a woman in U.S. history. Prison records showed Hemme, 64, was being held at the Chillicothe Correctional Center in Chillicothe, Mo., as of Saturday night.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... a-jeschke/

Judge Patrick Robb was an assistant prosecuting attorney in Buchanan County in 1985, the year Hemme went to trial. He knew that Holman “was connected to the case” and discussed that with Hemme’s trial attorney, Robert Duncan.

Robb, who is now a judge in Buchanan County, said he followed the Brady rule, which requires prosecutors turn over exculpatory or impeaching evidence to the defense. But he also said he did not trust St. Joseph’s police chief at the time, James Robert “Bob” Hayes.

Under Hayes, police elicited a false confession from Melvin Lee Reynolds in a different murder case. Robb advocated for Reynolds’ release and he was freed in 1983.

In 1998, Mr. Hayes was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and armed criminal action in the shooting death a year earlier of Tony Coone, a neighbor. Mr. Hayes characterized the shooting as self-defense, claiming Mr. Coone had attacked him with a hammer.