Trump Spouts More Electric Car Misinformation At Recent Rally

Steven Loveday -   Electrek

Donald Trump Presents The Lordstown Endurance At The White House

FAKE CAR FROM EV COMPANY THAT WENT BROKE

Trump has made it clear recently that he's not too happy with Tesla's Elon Musk, and he suddenly no longer supports EVs.

If you haven't watched or listened to former President Donald Trump's recent rally speech in Pennsylvania, you may want to carve out some time, or not. Trump spent a great deal of time, once again, lying to his base about a number of topics and issues, though the only part we care to address is his claims about electric cars.

Fortunately, journalist Aaron Rupar took to Twitter to share a number of important clips from the speech, so we don't have to watch or listen to the whole thing. If you're interested in getting a decent dose of all Trump's wild words, click on the tweets below to check out the full thread.

Essentially, Aaron was listening to the speech and tweeting out key moments with commentary. He covers Trumpism in general, the FBI, Barron Trump, Hillary Clinton, dictatorships, Russia, Bill Barr, the China virus, and the list goes on and on and on. Perhaps you'll find the thread entertaining, or perhaps it will get you all worked up.

At any rate, let's hone in here on Trump's rant about EVs. He starts by touting how good things were when he was in office. He talks about gas costs being $1.87 per gallon. However, he made this claim a few times in the past, and fact-checkers quickly ruled that it was false.

Trump goes on to say his administration wasn't talking about going to all-electric cars. However, he showed them off at The White House and raved about them during his presidency. He also had Tesla CEO Elon Musk on one of his special advisory boards, though Musk left after Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord.

Trump says EVs are "twice as expensive," and they only get like “38 miles per gallon.” Electric cars and SUVs will definitely cost you more than similar gas-powered cars, but not twice as much, and they'll also save you money on fuel and maintenance. We honestly have no idea where 38 mpg came from, but there's no EV with that fuel economy. In fact, EV efficiency isn't measured in miles per gallon, since there's no gallon of electricity.

Read These Related Stories For Background:
Tesla's Elon Musk Talks Future Trump Presidency And Trump's Lies

Trump & Biden Seem To Agree On One Thing: Both Support Electric Cars

The speech moves to a story about a friend of Trump's who used his EV to travel from Kentucky to Washington DC. Trump said his friend complained about the road trip taking way too long due to the car's range and the time it took to charge. This could very well be true, and it has a whole lot to do with the lack of charging infrastructure in the US.

Thankfully, the current administration is aware of the problem with charging infrastructure and it's already working to fix it. Now that Trump has been made aware of the concerns, he could also work to help Americans by fixing it, especially if he were to get voted back into The White House.

Sadly, based on how he seems to feel about EVs, it's more likely that Trump will work to have them eliminated. In the speech, he actually does say we need to get rid of electric vehicles.

Source: Aaron Rupar (Twitter) 

CNN Correspondent Uses Last Day At Network To Send Message On Trump

Ben Blanchet Fri, September 2, 2022 

CNN White House correspondent John Harwood spent his last hours at the network declaring there is truth to the “threat to democracy” President Joe Biden outlined in his primetime speech on Thursday.

Harwood, who has been the White House correspondent with the network since February 2021, tweeted that Friday would be his last day.

He reportedly knew last month that Friday would be his last day despite two years remaining in his contract at the network, a source close to the departure told Press Watch’s Dan Froomkin.

The announcement came less than two hours after Harwood said the core point of Biden’s speech targeting “MAGA Republicans” is “true.”

“Now, that’s something that’s not easy for us – as journalists – to say. We’re brought up to believe there’s two different political parties with different points of view and we don’t take sides in honest disagreements between them,” Harwood said.

“But that’s not what we’re talking about. These are not honest disagreements,” he said.

You can watch Harwood’s remarks, including his take that the GOP is “led by a dishonest demagogue,” below.

A CNN spokesperson, in a statement, told The Hollywood Reporter that they wish him the best and appreciate his work covering the White House. It’s unclear what caused Harwood’s departure on Friday.

Harwood’s departure comes less than a month after “Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter left the network.

The departure appeared to be due to a strategy by CNN’s new chairman and CEO Chris Licht and Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav to muffle politically “confrontational” content at the network, the Associated Press reported.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

COLONIALISM IN THE CLOSET

Search for missing Native artifacts led to the discovery of bodies stored in ‘the most inhumane way possible’

Graham Lee Brewer

Sun, September 4, 2022 

Last winter, University of North Dakota English professor Crystal Alberts started searching for a missing pipe, a headdress and moccasins once on display at the school’s library, heading deep into the recesses of the nearly 140-year-old campus.

The collection was removed from the library in 1988, after students questioned whether the university should be showcasing objects of religious significance to Native Americans. Alberts, a colleague and her assistant searched in back rooms and storage closets, opening unmarked cardboard boxes.

Inside one of them, Alberts spotted the pipe. The assistant reached for it, she said.

“Don’t touch it,” Alberts recalls saying.

Image: Crystal Alberts (Grant McMillan)

She called Laine Lyons, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians who works for the UND Alumni Association and Foundation, and asked for help.

Lyons met with Alberts to offer advice on how to respectfully handle the items, watching as Alberts and her colleagues opened box after box. Lyons said she now feels naive thinking back on it, but she never expected what they found: more than 70 samples of human remains, many of them in boxes with no identifying information.

“The best way I can describe how we have found things is in the most inhumane way possible,” Lyons said. “Just completely disregarded that these were once people.”

She said it sunk in: Her university had failed to treat Native American remains with dignity and repatriate them to tribes, as required by federal law.

“In that moment,” she said, “we were another institution that didn’t do the right thing.”

Image: Laine Lyons (UND Alumni Association)

As soon as the bodies were discovered, UND President Andrew Armacost said administrators reached out to tribes — at first a half-dozen and now 13 — to start the process of returning the remains and more than 100 religious objects.

“What we’ve done as a university is terrible, and I will continue to apologize for it,” Armacost said in a Wednesday news conference, where he vowed to see every item and ancestor found to be returned to the proper tribal nation.

But that process will likely prove daunting and could take years — and in some cases, may be impossible because of the dearth of information, Lyons said.

“I have fears that maybe we won’t be able to identify people or maybe we won’t be able to place them back where they should be placed,” she said.

Since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, federal law has required institutions that receive federal funding to catalog their collections with the National Parks Service and work toward returning them to the tribal nations they were taken from. But the University of North Dakota has no entries in the federal inventory, even though its administrators acknowledge it has possessed Indigenous artifacts since its inception in 1883.

The discovery at UND is illustrative of a wider, systemic problem that has plagued Indigenous communities for centuries. Despite the decades-old law, more than 100,000 are still housed in institutions across the country. The action and apology by North Dakota administrators points to a national reckoning as tribal nations are increasing pressure on public universities, museums and even libraries to comply with the law and catalog and return the Native American ancestors and cultural items in their possession.

“We are heartbroken by the deeply insensitive treatment of these indigenous ancestral remains and artifacts and extend our deepest apologies to the sovereign tribal nations in North Dakota and beyond,” North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum said in a statement. “This dark chapter, while extremely hurtful, also presents an opportunity to enhance our understanding and respect for indigenous cultures and to become a model for the nation by conducting this process with the utmost deference to the wishes, customs and traditions of tribal nations.”

Image: Andrew Armacost (Shawna Schill / UND)

Armacost said he and his colleagues decided to honor the requests of tribal officials not to announce the discovery until a consensus could be built on how to handle the remains, and until Indigenous faculty, staff and students could be made aware of the situation in a respectful way.

Tribal officials and Indigenous archivists said that UND leaders should be commended for how they’ve responded, praising Armacost’s willingness to consult tribes immediately after the discovery and publicly apologize for the university’s failings. But they also called for accountability.

“It is always extremely traumatic and hurtful when our ancestors remains have been disturbed and misplaced,” Mark Fox, chairman of the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara Nation, said in a statement to NBC News.  “We will be monitoring this matter closely to ensure that our ancestor’s remains are repatriated as quickly and as respectfully as possible under the circumstances.”

Many universities and museums have NAGPRA officers on staff who inventory Indigenous remains and cultural items, affiliate them with their tribes of origin, and eventually return them. However, UND does not have its own NAGPRA office. The university has appointed a committee to review the findings, and Armacost told NBC News that hiring staff to facilitate NAGPRA cases is under consideration.

Dianne Derosiers, a historic preservation officer for the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, a tribal nation in North Dakota, said she wants to know who is responsible for unceremoniously locking away the human remains in university storage. “I’d like answers to that question,” she said.

Armacost said that finding out who is accountable will be part of the university’s investigation.

Lyons said she hopes UND’s discovery will be a wake-up call to other institutions that are dragging their feet when it comes to compliance with NAGPRA.

“Look at what you have, look at your past,” she said. “And if you know something, you need to say it and not hide it and not pass it off and wait for someone else to do it. You need to confront that right away.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

A North Carolina school baptized more than 100 kids without parental permission or attendance: 'Mama, can you bring me some dry clothes?'

Yelena Dzhanova

Sat, September 3, 2022 

• Northwood Temple Academy baptized more than 100 kids without their parents' permission or presence.

• Parents told Northwood Principal Renee McLamb that they were upset that they had missed the ceremony.

• "My daughter calls me from the school and says, 'Mama, can you bring me some dry clothes? I got baptized today,'" one parent said.

A North Carolina school baptized more than 100 students without asking permission from their parents, The Fayetteville Observer reported on Friday.

When parents learned that their children had been baptized at the Northwood Temple Academy, they were upset.

"My daughter calls me from the school and says, 'Mama, can you bring me some dry clothes? I got baptized today,'" one parent told the Observer. "I said, 'WHAT?'"

That parent told the Observer that she learned her 11-year-old daughter had been baptized while she was at work on a conference call.

A few students had actually been scheduled to be baptized, Northwood Principal Renee McLamb told the Observer. But then the rest of the students felt moved to join in on the ceremony, McLamb said, adding that she didn't intend for the event to be a secret from parents.

"Truly, the Lord began to move this morning and we were so excited about what the Lord was doing. Several students had given their lives to the Lord during Spiritual Emphasis Week and they were scheduled to be baptized this morning," she said in an email to the Observer. "But the Spirit of the Lord moved and the invitation to accept the Lord and be baptized was given and the students just began to respond to the presence of the Lord."

Multiple parents complained to McLamb.

"In hindsight, we would do it differently and give the students an opportunity to contact their parents and ask permission to be baptized," the principal wrote in an email to the Observer. "We were not expecting such an overwhelming response to the message that was spoken, but as a mother I certainly can empathize with why some parents were upset."

Some parents said they were upset that they missed their child's baptism, a religious ceremony that's usually celebrated with a family gathering to witness the event.

Another parent said the school's baptism felt like it "undid the baptism that had already taken place at their church."

"This is what I think they should have done," the parent of the 11-year-old told the Observer. "They should have corralled the kids in the back of the church, another room — somewhere — and said, 'We understand your desire to get this done. We'd love for your families to be here and present with you."

"Or invitations even," she added.

Read the original article on Insider

Nigeria to pay $496 million to settle claims over steel plants

By Felix Onuah

ABUJA, Sept 3 (Reuters) - Nigeria has agreed to pay $496 million to settle a multi-billion dollar claim from Global Steel Holdings Ltd following the termination of a contract to upgrade the country's steel plants, the presidency said on Saturday.

Global Steel, which is linked to India's Mittal family, had between 2004-7 acquired rights to Nigeria's entire state steel industry via five major concessions and share purchase contracts. The deal also included access to Nigeria's iron ore reserves and the central railway network.

But in 2008, the government of the late Umaru Yar'Adua terminated the contracts. Global Steel sought arbitration at the International Chamber of Commerce, Court of Arbitration in Paris the same year.

Between 2011 and 2020, Global Steel and the Nigerian government made several attempts to settle but failed.

Nigeria's Attorney General and Minister of Justice Abubakar Malami, who led the negotiations, said the government had managed to get a 91% haircut on the original claims of $5.258 billion.

"I pay tribute to President (Muhammadu) Buhari for his dedication to resolving this problem and wrestling back a crown jewel of our national industrialisation plans rather than leaving the endeavour to the future administration to deal with," he said. (Reporting by Felix Onuah Editing by Ros Russell)

GRANDE GUIGNOL CULTURE

'Mosaic of pain': 17 atrocities reported in the news a day in Mexico, study finds


Search for Debanhi Escobar, an 18-year-old law student who has been missing since April 9, continues in Escobedo

Fri, September 2, 2022

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - An average of 17 atrocities were reported in news outlets in Mexico each day during the first six months of 2022, up 18% from the same period last year, according to a report by non-governmental organization Causa en Comun.

In Mexico, where some newspapers and TV are dedicated to "nota roja" crime reporting, decades of violence has left over 100,000 missing and recently driven efforts to restructure the country's security forces.

The NGO, which defined atrocities as the intentional use of force to severely abuse, maim, kill or provoke terror, counted 5,463 victims from 3,123 events reported in 2,657 news articles.

"This work points to an accumulation of stories that present a mosaic of pain and cruelty, hidden behind crime statistics," the organization said in a statement.

"The purpose of our study is to rescue our capacity to be moved by the accumulation of horrors."

Though the study was not exhaustive, it underlined the severity and number of atrocities recorded every day in Mexico.

In the first half of 2022, the study found the number of reports of torture doubled to 856, while those of murdering women using "extreme cruelty" rose 87% to 410.

Media reports of "high-impact" violence by criminal groups against authorities or large crowds meanwhile rose 756%, from 25 to 214.

Although the problem of organized crime dominates public debate, the study noted that a large part of the violence was perpetrated by individuals, families and communities.

Beyond police work, the problem of violence requires sociological and specialized psychological work on a national scale, it said.

The group published its report the same day as Mexico's lower house of Congress debated a controversial bill to bring the civilian-led national guard under army control, which critics say would militarize law and order.

Reports of violence increased in every state in Mexico, but were concentrated in the Pacific coastal state Baja California, where they nearly tripled, as well as in the central states of Guanajuato and Michoacan.

Atrocities reported in news outlets across Mexico: https://graphics.reuters.com/MEXICO-CRIME/dwpkrxdqgvm/chart.png

(Reporting by Sarah Morland; Editing by William Mallard)

What is non-Hodgkin lymphoma? Is it curable? What to know after Jane Fonda's diagnosis



Marina Pitofsky, USA TODAY
Sat, September 3, 2022 

Jane Fonda on Friday shared that she has been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, with the 84-year-old actor and activist confirming that she has started chemotherapy treatments.

Fonda called herself “lucky” because she has “health insurance and access to the best doctors and treatments.”

“I realize, and it’s painful, that I am privileged in this. Almost every family in America has had to deal with cancer at one time or another and far too many don’t have access to the quality health care I am receiving and this is not right,” she shared in a post on Instagram.

But what is non-Hodgkin lymphoma? Can it be treated? Here’s what you need to know.

Jane Fonda reveals cancer diagnosis: Star promises chemotherapy won't stop climate activism




What is non-Hodgkin lymphoma? Is it curable?

Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is a kind of cancer that starts in a person's lymphatic system, “part of the body's germ-fighting immune system,” according to the Mayo Clinic. A person’s white blood cells, called lymphocytes, can form tumors throughout their body.

There are over 70 types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, according to the Cleveland Clinic. People with non-Hodgkin lymphomas can go into remission, meaning they do not have any symptoms, and tests show they do not demonstrate signs of the cancer.

Experts have found that many aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphomas come back during the first two years after a person has completed treatment, or they do not ever come back.

Hodgkin lymphoma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma are both kinds of cancer that begin in lymphocytes, though their main difference "is in the specific lymphocyte each involves," according to the Mayo Clinic.

What are the symptoms of non-Hodgkin lymphoma?

Symptoms of non-Hodgkin lymphoma that a person might notice include:

Swollen lymph nodes in the neck, armpits or groin


Chest pain


Fatigue


Unexplainable weight loss


Fever

How is non-Hodgkin lymphoma treated?

There are many different treatment options for people diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The goal of the treatments is typically to kill cancer cells or prevent them from dividing, according to the Cleveland Clinic, and some include:

Watchful waiting/active surveillance: If a person has a slow-growing non-Hodgkin lymphoma and no symptoms, a medical provider may advise that they wait to pursue treatment until they begin experiencing symptoms.

Traditional systemic chemotherapy: A person may also take drugs that attack cancer cells in their body. These drugs are traditionally administered intravenously.

Targeted therapy: This kind of treatment uses medicines that can target cancer cells and damage the lymphoma cells to control their spread, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine.
What is the survival rate for non-Hodgkin lymphoma?

According to the American Cancer Society, which relies on information from the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results database maintained by the National Cancer Institute, the overall five-year relative survival rate for people with non-Hodgkin lymphoma is 73%. A relative survival rate “compares people with the same type and stage of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) to people in the overall population,” according to the organization.

However, survival rates can vary depending on the person. Fonda in her Friday Instagram post called her condition “a very treatable cancer,” adding that “80% of people survive, so I feel very lucky.”

Are there causes of non-Hodgkin lymphoma

In most cases, a doctor will not know what causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma, according to the Mayo Clinic. However, some factors that may increase a person’s risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma can include medications that suppress your immune system, infections with certain viruses and bacteria (such as HIV and Epstein-Barr infections), chemicals (such as those used to kill weeds and insects), and more.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Jane Fonda: What is non-Hodgkin lymphoma? Is the cancer curable?

 

The Christian right’s Faustian bargain

It goes back 42 years.

Former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Sept. 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

September 6, 2022

By 

Mark Silk

Spiritual Politics

(RNS) — “Trump should fill Christians with rage,” begins the headline on Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson’s latest opinion piece. “How come he doesn’t?”

Gerson, former chief speechwriter for George W. Bush and prominent evangelical-around-town, states the answer as succinctly as anybody: “Much of what considers itself Christian America has assumed the symbols and identity of white authoritarian populism — an alliance that is a serious, unfolding threat to liberal democracy.”

How did we get to this point? 

In Gerson’s view, the Christian Americans in question have come to feel themselves “outsiders in their own land” for holding traditional Western views on marriage and gender — views that are reviled by progressive elites. Whereupon: “Leaders in the Republican Party have fed, justified and exploited conservative Christians’ defensiveness in service to an aggressive, reactionary politics.”

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RELATED: From the new Christian right to Christian nationalism, part 1

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Ergo, resistance to vaccine and mask mandates, discrediting of fair elections, baseless charges of gay grooming in schools, silencing the teaching of the history of racism, and a belief in political institutions suffused in godless conspiracies. And that’s not to mention attachment to Confederate nostalgia, antisemitic replacement theory and QAnon accusations of satanic child sacrifice.

It’s a powerful assessment, but altogether too present-minded. The malady of the Christian America Gerson diagnoses goes back at least half a century, and its exploitation was engineered— by evangelical as well as Republican leaders — long before Gerson joined the Bush II administration.

When conservative Christians first began mounting political protests in the 1970s, they did so as, well, Christian conservatives. Whether it was Phyllis Schlafly and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints versus the Equal Rights Amendment, Anita Bryant versus the Dade County gay rights ordinance, or folks in Kanawha County versus public school textbooks, the protests were defensive — and nonpartisan. So too with the anti-abortion movement, which got off the ground toward the end of the decade.

But in 1980 that ceased to be the case, and here’s how.

Mesmerized by the idea of creating a Republican majority based in the increasingly populous Sun Belt, Republican insiders were shocked and dismayed by the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. For a moderate Democratic ex-governor of Georgia to carry every state of the Confederacy except Virginia posed a mortal threat to the GOP’s “Southern strategy.”

Pastor James Robison, left, speaks and Ronald Reagan, center, applauds during the National Affairs Briefing in Dallas in August 1980. Video screen grab

And so it became essential to turn as many white Southerners as possible into Republican voters and, ideally, political activists. It all came together in August 1980, when 10,000 evangelicals came to Reunion Arena in Dallas for what was called the National Affairs Briefing.

The attendees were told, “You’ll walk away with know-how to inform and mobilize your church and community in a nonpartisan drive to push beyond complaint into positive control of your destiny.”

The object was the opposite of nonpartisan. Alongside major evangelical preachers, the event featured an array of prominent conservative Republican pols and culminated in the appearance of newly nominated presidential nominee Ronald Reagan, who stroked the crowd. “I know you cannot endorse me,” he said, “but I endorse you and everything you do.”

Come November, Carter lost every state of the Confederacy except his own. The Christian right was on its way; the Republican alliance, its Faustian bargain. Seduced by the promise of power, most white evangelicals and many other white Christians as well would become locked as much into a Republican as a Christian identity.

in a recent interview on the Ezra Klein Show, Russell Moore, former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission who now edits Christianity Today, testified to his own experience as a teenager in Mississippi in the 1980s.

The problem is when the political ideas or even worse, the political affiliations and those sorts of tribal identities, that becomes primary. And so the religion then becomes kind of a means to an end.

That was one of the really difficult problems I had to grapple with as a teenager was seeing voting guides that would say here’s the Christian position on line item veto, balanced budget amendment, those sorts of things, and realizing, is there a Christian position on the Strategic Defense Initiative and how much funding it should get? 

Getting those voter guides into evangelical churches was the specialty of the Christian Coalition. Allegedly nonpartisan, the guides were structured by Executive Director Ralph Reed to favor only Republican candidates — as the IRS belatedly recognized when it denied the organization nonprofit status in 1999.

As Thomas Edsall and Hanna Rosin of The Washington Post put it at the time, “In states with large evangelical and fundamentalist constituencies, the coalition, the premier organization of the religious right, has helped Republicans at every level of the ballot, playing a crucial role in the GOP takeover of the House and Senate in 1994.”

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RELATED: For the religious right, a victory 50 years in the making

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By the early 2000s, when Reed became head of the Georgia Republican Party and flipped the state from blue to red, the Christian right was literally demonizing the other side. As a lonely Democrat in a suburban Atlanta church emailed me two decades ago, “The ‘in-crowd’ at my church is all Republican and regularly encourage others in the church to attend the Christian Coalition meetings and rallies. … If I ever spoke up in defense of a Democratic politician, I was talked down and sometimes actually yelled at by red-faced Deacons saying that the Democrats are the work of the devil.”

The corrupting influence of power is an old story. Meditating on the theological relevance of the latest Lord of the Rings series in his most recent column for The Dispatch, anti-Trump evangelical David French writes: “Tolkien wasn’t naive. He knew that world. He’d confronted it directly. That’s why characters like Boromir or Fëanor resonate so strongly. In the quest to confront the enemy, you become the enemy.”

Rage? Having long since cast its political enemy as the devil, how could the Christian right have done other than embrace the demonic Donald Trump?

'God-denying' women and self-replacing Christians: How religion changes birthrates

Religion News Service - Yesterday 

(RNS) — According to Bloomberg News, South Korea’s fertility rate dropped from .84 babies per woman to .81 in 2021, the lowest figure on record. If current trends continue, the number of people in South Korea will be the same in 2100 as it was in 1960. In response, the government has tripled the baby payment as a way to induce more childbearing.

This collapse in fertility is also evident in China and in many European countries, where the total population in many places has the potential to drop by half in the next eight years.

Religion has become a part of the conversation about declining birthrates. Recently, pastor and podcaster Dale Partridge tweeted about the “great sadness” of “God-denying” 39-year-old women who are intentionally single and childless who will realize in later years that they will have “a total sense of emptiness” for not finding a partner and having children.

For Partridge, rejecting the institutions of marriage and parenthood is to embrace a lifestyle that is antithetical to his understanding of God’s design for human beings — namely, that “they be fruitful and multiply.”

RELATED: When she doesn’t want a baby

But does religious belief actually have an impact on how people in the United States think and act about marriage and family? The General Social Survey has been asking questions about whether someone is married and whether they have children since the early 1970s. The results do point to religion as an important factor for many when it comes to making important life decisions.



'God-denying' women and self-replacing Christians: How religion changes birthrates© Provided by Religion News Service

In a GSS question about marital status, respondents are asked to identify as married, separated, divorced, widowed or never been married. In 1972, about 14% of the American population reported that they had never wed. Evangelicals were just a bit lower at 9%. However, those without a religious affiliation reported a much higher likelihood of never being married. In 1972, 36% of them had never walked down the aisle.

Over time, the portion of Americans who have remained single has clearly climbed. In 2021, nearly 3 in 10 adults said that they have not married — double the rate in 1972. Evangelicals have also seen a significant increase, with 19% never having wed.


Among the so-called nones — those unaffiliated with any religious organization — the share of people who have never married, at 42% in 2021, has increased, but the rise has been far more modest. Still, that’s about 12 percentage points above the national average.



'God-denying' women and self-replacing Christians: How religion changes birthrates© Provided by Religion News Service

Religion doesn’t only impact the likelihood of entering into matrimony. It can have profound impacts on other decisions, such as when to have children or the number of children to have. That’s clearly shown by the General Social Survey. In the early 1970s, evangelical households had a little more than 2.5 children on average. That was just slightly higher than the average American, who was having 2.3 children. Nones were much, much lower than that. In 1972, the average none had 1.4 children.

There’s unmistakable evidence of declining fertility rates in the data as well. The average respondent reported having 1.8 children in 2021, a dip of .5 over the last five decades. Evangelicals were also reporting declining birthrates between 1972 and 2000, but those numbers have slightly rebounded from there. The average evangelical has about 2.1 children now, slightly above the national average.

For nones, there is also decline in fertility, but it’s much less severe. According to the most recent data, the average none has about 1.3 children, a slight increase from two decades ago, but still 50% below the national average.



'God-denying' women and self-replacing Christians: How religion changes birthrates© Provided by Religion News Service

One curious development when talking about birthrates is the expanding trend of “child-free” individuals, who have declared they will never have children for a wide variety of reasons. There’s a community dedicated to these individuals on Reddit, boasting 1.5 million members.

This trend has yet to show up in the data, however. Looking at those who are at least 40 years old, little evidence supports the notion that the child-free movement has momentum in the general public. In the 1970s, about 13% of adults 40 or older had never had children. Today, it’s risen by perhaps 1 or 2 percentage points.

RELATED: The future of the church may belong to the fecund, but not the nuclear family

Even the nones are still having children, though their story is more complicated. In the 1970s, nearly 20% of nones were child-free before dipping slightly in the 1980s, and then peaking at 28% in the early 2000s. But from that point forward, nones 40 or older with no children dropped as a share of nones overall. They now make up about 20% of the group — 6 points higher than the national average, but far less than the nearly 15-point gap in 2004.

So while religion affects trends in marriage and offspring in sometimes unclear ways, the one loud message is for the nones: Their focus must be on conversion, not retention. While the unaffiliated nones have grown by leaps and bounds over the last three decades, their low birthrate means they will have to bring in new members who were raised in other faith traditions to maintain that momentum in the coming decades.

(Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and author of “The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going.” He can be reached on Twitter at @ryanburge. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

Ahead of the Trend is a collaborative effort between Religion News Service and the Association of Religion Data Archives made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation. See other Ahead of the Trend articles here.

AUSTRALIA

Mystery 4,000-Foot Coral Reef Found in the Middle of the Desert

Jess Thomson - 9h ago


The remains of a multimillion-year-old coral reef have been discovered in the middle of a desert in Australia.

Southern Australia's Nullarbor Plain, where the reef was found, is now a 76,000-square- mile desert consisting of limestone bedrock. But it was covered by a tropical ocean about 14 million years ago, during the Cenozoic period.

Researchers from the Timescales of Mineral Systems Group at Curtin University's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Perth spotted the reef as a bull's-eye shape on new high-resolution satellite imagery. The discovery challenged their previous assumptions that the Nullarbor Plain had always been featureless.

"Unlike many parts of the world, large areas of the Nullarbor Plain have remained largely unchanged by weathering and erosion processes over millions of years, making it a unique geological canvas recording ancient history in remarkable ways," co-author and geologist Milo Barham of Curtin University said in a statement.

"Through high-resolution satellite imagery and fieldwork we have identified the clear remnant of an original sea-bed structure preserved for millions of years, which is the first of this kind of landform discovered on the Nullarbor Plain," Barham said.

Most of Australia has been dry in modern times, with 18 percent of the country classified as desert. But for hundreds of millions of years, Australia was covered with rain forests and seas, including the ocean that once put the Nullarbor Plain underwater.

The coral reef structure has a circular elevated rim and a central dome shape, according to a paper published in the journal Earth Surface Processes and Landforms. The structure is between 3,950 and 4,250 feet in diameter.

In addition, the structure is distinct from other landforms observed on the plain and cannot be explained by any of the geological processes common to the area, the paper said.

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"The ring-shaped 'hill' cannot be explained by extra-terrestrial impact or any known deformation processes but preserves original microbial textures and features typically found in the modern Great Barrier Reef," Barham said.

The researchers' access to new high-resolution satellite imagery has allowed them to spot much more subtle features of the Nullarbor Plain. This led them to realize it wasn't a featureless and unchanging landscape, which they had thought it became after its ocean dried up.

"Evidence of the channels of long-vanished rivers, as well as sand dune systems imprinted directly into limestone, preserve an archive of ancient landscapes and even a record of the prevailing winds," Barham said.

"And it is not only landscapes. Isolated cave shafts punctuating the Nullarbor Plain preserve mummified remains of Tasmanian tigers and complete skeletons of long-extinct wonders such as Thylacoleo, the marsupial lion," he said.


A picture of the reef included in the paper. Curtin University School of Earth and Planetary Sciences / Timescales of Mineral Systems Group

Further exploration of the geology of Nullarbor may aid researchers in their quest to learn more about the beginnings of our solar system and of Earth itself.

"At the surface, due to the relatively stable conditions, the Nullarbor Plain has preserved large quantities of meteorites, allowing us to peer back through time to the origins of our solar system," Barham said.

"These features, in conjunction with the millions of years old landscape features we have now identified, effectively make the Nullarbor Plain a land that time forgot and allow a fascinating deeper understanding of Earth's history," he said.

IT USED TO BE A WEEK

Russian Defence Ministry spends three days thinking how to explain non-admission of journalists to Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant


Ukrainska Pravda

KATERYNA TYSHCHENKO — SUNDAY, 4 SEPTEMBER 2022

The Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation has stated that Ukrainian and Western journalists, whom the invaders did not let enter the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear power Plant (ZNPP) on 1 September, were allegedly preparing a provocation and that more than 60 media representatives from different countries were allowed to enter in their place.

Source: statement by an official representative of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation

Details: Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine, has said that journalists were not able to accompany the IAEA mission to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP). The Russian Defence Ministry responded to this statement only on Sunday, 4 September.

Quote from the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation: "While the Kyiv regime and its Western sponsors were preparing for an operation to seize the ZNPP on 1 September, specially chosen and trained ‘media representatives’ from Ukraine, the US and the UK had to inform the world community in the presence of the IAEA of the transfer of the station to Kyiv’s control.

To this end, as was confirmed on 2 September of this year by Zelenskyy's public statement, the Kyiv government added cars carrying Ukrainian and Western journalists to the IAEA motorcade".

More details: The Russian Defence Ministry said that according to "detailed and agreed documents", access to the territory of Zaporizhzhia Oblast that is controlled by the invaders should have been provided strictly on the basis of the lists previously submitted to the Russian Defence Ministry by the UN Department of Safety and Security.

"No representatives of the Ukrainian or other mass media who were supposed to accompany the convoy of IAEA experts from the territory controlled by the Kyiv regime to the Zaporizhzhya NPP on 1 September are included on the agreed mission lists," the Russians say.

The Russian Defence Ministry stated that "in order to comply with the safety protocol of the mission", all outsiders who tried to cross the line of demarcation together with the IAEA motorcade were halted and not allowed to pass.

The Russian authorities also claim that at the request of the IAEA Secretariat, more than 60 media representatives, including from France, the United States, China, Denmark, Japan, Germany, Turkey, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Vietnam and other countries, were invited by the Russians to cover the mission's work at Zaporizhzhia NPP.

According to the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, on the morning of 1 September, the journalists belonging to this pool who arrived in Enerhodar were allegedly "direct eyewitnesses of an unsuccessful attempt to storm the Zaporizhzhia NPP by Ukrainian saboteurs and, hiding in a bomb shelter, personally observed a massive artillery attack by the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the nuclear plant and residential quarters in Enerhodar."

Background: The mission of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was supposed to arrive at the Zaporizhzhia NPP on 31 August, but did not get there until 1 September.

It took quite some time for the mission to reach the ZNPP, with the Russians not providing the experts with special passes. Fourteen members of the mission did not arrive at the occupied station until 1 September and spent 2.5 hours there, after which only 5 representatives of the mission remained at the nuclear power plant. Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that the IAEA team would maintain its presence at the Zaporizhzhia plant.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that despite the agreement with IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi, the mission arrived at the Zaporizhzhia NPP without any escort by independent journalists.