Responding to his being one of only seven Democrats in the Senate to vote against Debo Adegbile, President Obama’s nominee to head the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, over 200 students, faculty and alumni of Yale Law School and Yale Divinity School have signed a letter criticizing Coons and urging him to change his vote. [...]
“As students, professors and practitioners, your vote alarmed us,” reads the Yale letter. “It signaled a lack of respect for the fundamental American legal principle that all parties have a right to zealous representation, and sent a message that young people considering public service careers should avoid work on behalf of unpopular or marginalized communities and clients.”
All told, railcar accidents spilled more than 1.15 million gallons of crude oil in 2013, federal data shows, compared with an average of just 22,000 gallons a year from 1975 through 2012—a fifty-fold spike.
Kyle Hunt had grand visions of thousands of white men coming out of the woodwork this weekend to stand up and defend their interests in a public march that would grab the nation’s attention. Like a lot of such plans, things didn’t exactly work out that way. [...]
Hunt told the press beforehand that he expected “thousands” to participate. On Saturday, only a smattering of attendees showed up in New York. There were similarly tiny gatherings in Florence, Ky., Tempe, Ariz. and Birmingham, Ala., where police took down the “Diversity” banners. Demonstrators also showed up in Branson, Mo. and Olympia, Wash.
Words commonly used to refer to the developmental stages of an embryo—and even the word embryo itself—are used as a tool of oppression, according to the president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
Dr. Russell Moore made the comments last week during a prayer at the Susan B. Anthony List 2014 Campaign for Life Gala.[...]
“We know that tomorrow morning legislators in this city will be deciding whether or not to oppress the most vulnerable around us, not only with laws but also even before that with words, referring to persons you have created in your image as simply zygotes or embryoes or fetuses or crisis pregnancies rather than persons, neighbors, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters.”
Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey and Reading University have demonstrated that, after over 1,500 years frozen in Antarctic ice, moss can come back to life and continue to grow. For the first time, this vital part of the ecosystem in both polar regions has been shown to have the ability to survive century to millennial scale ice ages. This provides exciting new insight into the survival of life on Earth.
The team, reporting in Current Biology this week, observed moss regeneration after at least 1,530 years frozen in permafrost. This is the first study to show such long-term survival in any plant; similar timescales have only been seen before in bacteria. Mosses are known to survive environmental extremes in the short-term with previous evidence confirming up to a 20 year timescale for survival. Their potential to survive much longer timescales had not previously been examined.
- On today's Kagro in the Morning show: A new Godwin alert. Greg Dworkin takes the wheel & rounds up everything from politics to the origins of the universe. Gimmetarian entitlement on guns & money (no law, so no lawyers). How stealing it all is just like being oppressed by Nazis.