Today’s comic by Jen Sorensen is The tragedy of baby-on-gun violence:
• Facebook official says there is no evidence conservative news stories were suppressed: But that hasn’t stopped Senate Republicans from launching an investigation.
Facebook vice president of search Tom Stocky writes in a post, "There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality," adding that the guidelines don't permit political perspectives to be suppressed or one viewpoint or outlet to be prioritized over another.
Stocky also says an allegation that the site artificially forced the Black Lives Matter movement to trend is "untrue."
• President Obama signs law making bison the national mammal: The law is the National Bison Legacy Act, which puts the shaggy beast in the same category as the bald eagle as a national animal. Once there were tens of millions of bison across North America. But in the 1800s, they were slaughtered en masse, reducing their numbers to about 1,100 in 1889. While they were hunted for their hides and meat, which could be a lucrative undertaking, they were also slaughtered for the hell of it, with train passengers blasting away at herds from their cars. And they were killed as a matter of conquest. A U.S. Army officer told buffalo runner Frank Mayer, “Mayer, either the buffalo or the Indian must go. There isn’t any other way. Only when the Indian becomes absolutely dependent upon us for his every need will we be able to handle him. Every buffalo you kill now will save a white man’s life. Go to it.” Today, some half million bison live in all 50 states, though most are west of the Mississippi. And most of these are not pure wild bison, but mixed with cattle genes after years of breeding on ranches where they became semi-domesticated livestock. According to Defenders of Wildlife, only about 30,000 wild bison exist today in conservation herds and tribal lands. Only in Yellowstone National Park are there unfenced wild bison today, some 5,000 purebreds with a prehistoric lineage dating back scores of millennia before humans arrived on the continent.
• Japan now has more electric car charge points than gasoline stations. There are 40,000 of them compared with 9,000 in the United States, but thousands of them are in private garages.
• Teenager may have found lost Maya city based on ancient star maps and satellite images: Canadian William Gadoury invested a lot of time looking at diagrams of constellations and maps of known Maya cities in what is now Mexico and Central America. He noticed two of the brightest stars of the constellations overlaid perfectly with the locations of the largest Maya cities. No scientist had ever made this connection previously. He then studied 22 other constellations and found that they meshed with the locations of 117 Mayan cities. Looking at a 23rd constellation, he matched two stars to known cities but could not match a third star with any city. Using Google maps, Gadoury found a location on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, once the heart of Classical Maya culture, where he thought there should be a city. He persuaded the Canadian Space Agency to train its satellite telescopes on the spot. This returned photos of of geometric shapes in the jungle, what appears to be an ancient Maya pyramid surrounded by 30 smaller structures. Gadoury has named the city K’aak Chi, which means “Mouth of Fire.” The site has not been verified on the ground yet, and it is in a very remote, expensive to reach area. But if Gadoury’s research proves accurate, K’aak Chi could be one of the largest Maya cities ever found.
• One in five of the world’s plant species is at risk of extinction.
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• Ten cognitive biases that affect everyday life.
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin defuses the latest Q-poll. Again. NC pegs Gop fate to the bathroom police. Now we know Christie’s price. Darwin Mesadieu reports on Rick Scott’s race-to-the-bottom job trolling. Unintended consequences found in the weeds of Maine’s superdelegate reform.
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