RACIST INJUSTICE EVEN IN DEATH
Philly health official forced to resign over MOVE cremations

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Philadelphia's top health official was compelled to resign Thursday after the city's mayor said he learned human remains from the 1985 bombing of the headquarters of a Black organization had been cremated and disposed of without notifying family members.

 Provided by The Canadian Press

Mayor Jim Kenney said in a statement that Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley decided to cremate and dispose of the remains of the MOVE bombing victims several years ago.

In a statement released by the mayor’s office, Farley said that in early 2017 he was told by the city’s medical examiner, Dr. Sam Gulino, that a box had been found containing materials related to MOVE bombing victims' autopsies.

“In the box were bones and bone fragments, presumably from one or more of the victims,” Farley said.

It is a standard procedure to retain specimens after an autopsy ends and the remains are turned over to the decedent’s next-of-kin, Farley said.

“Believing that investigations related to the MOVE bombing had been completed more than 30 years earlier, and not wanting to cause more anguish for the families of the victims, I authorized Dr. Gulino to follow this procedure and dispose of the bones and bone fragments," Farley said.

The decision was his alone, and other top city officials were not consulted, he said.

After recent reports that local institutions had remains of MOVE bombing victims, Farley said he reconsidered his actions and notified higher-ups.

“I profoundly regret making this decision without consulting the family members of the victims and I extend my deepest apologies for the pain this will cause them,” Farley wrote.

Kenney said Farley's decision lacked empathy. Gulino has also been put on leave pending an investigation, Kenney said.

Philadelphia police attempting to serve warrants on four members and evict the rest of the Black back-to-nature group from its headquarters in the city bombed it, igniting fuel for a generator. The fire spread to more than 60 row homes. Among the 11 slain were five children.

Kenney said he informed family members about what officials did with the remains. Thursday is the 36th anniversary of the bombing.

“Today, I had the opportunity to meet with members of the Africa family and apologize for the way this situation was handled, and for how the city has treated them for the last five decades," Kenney said.

MOVE members took the surname Africa after the group's founder, John Africa.

Kenney said Farley took responsibility and resigned. The city has hired a law firm to investigate.

The Associated Press

All committed MOVE members take the last name “Africa” out of reverence for our Founder JOHN AFRICA, and to show that we are a family, a unified body moving in one direction. We have Black, White, Puerto Rican members from upper and lower class backgrounds, both college and street (mis)educated.

About MOVE – On a Move

onamove.com/about/

Judge approves $577 million settlement for Maryland HBCUs
 

ANNAPOLIS (AP) — A federal judge has approved a $577 million settlement in a lawsuit over underfunding at Maryland's four historically Black colleges and universities.

The deal approved Wednesday will provide $555 million in extra funding over 10 years, beginning in 2023, for Bowie State University, Coppin State University, Morgan State University in Baltimore and the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore.

The total amount includes $22 million in legal costs for the plaintiffs who spent 15 years litigating these claims.

The lawsuit accused Maryland of underfunding the institutions while developing programs at traditionally white schools that directly competed with them, draining away prospective students.

In 2013, U.S. District Judge Catherine C. Blake found that the state had maintained “a dual and segregated education system” that violated the Constitution. Blake issued an order Wednesday stating the settlement adequately addresses the problem.

The funds are expected to go toward scholarships and financial aid as well as faculty recruitment and development. Funds also can be used to expand and improve existing academic programs, including online programs, and to develop and implement new academic programs.

The Maryland General Assembly passed legislation this spring finalizing the settlement. Republican Gov. Larry Hogan had vetoed a similar bill last year, saying he would approve no more than $200 million, The Baltimore Sun reported.

The Associated Press

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
UK fraud watchdog investigating GFG Alliance

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is investigating Gupta Family Group Alliance, including its financing arrangements with collapsed Greensill Capital, it said on Friday.

© Reuters/Russell Cheyne FILE PHOTO: The GFG Alliance flag flies at the completion of a 330 million pound deal to buy Britain's last remaining Aluminium smelter in Fort William Lochaber Scotland

"The SFO is investigating suspected fraud, fraudulent trading and money laundering in relation to the financing and conduct of the business of companies within the Gupta Family Group Alliance (GFG), including its financing arrangements with Greensill Capital UK Ltd," the SFO said in a statement.

© Reuters/RUSSELL CHEYNE FILE PHOTO: A view of the Lochaber Aluminium smelter and hydroelectric site, which is owned by Sanjeev Gupta's GFG Alliance, at Fort William

A representative of GFG Alliance, steel magnate Sanjeev Gupta's family conglomerate, said the group had no immediate comment on the matter.

The SFO said it had no further comment given it was a live investigation.

GFG Alliance, Gupta's privately held conglomerate, has relied heavily on Greensill Capital to fund its operations.

Greensill is facing insolvency after its main insurer stopped providing credit insurance on $4.1 billion of debt in portfolios it had created for clients including Credit Suisse.

Britain's Financial Conduct Authority said on Tuesday it was formally investigating the UK operations of supply chain finance company Greensill as part of global probes.

Greensill lent money to firms by buying their invoices at a discount, but collapsed in March 2021 after insurers pulled their cover.

(Reporting by Huw Jones; editing by David Goodman and Jason Nee

Wall Street Bets was right: Hertz's bankruptcy auction will actually give shareholders a handsome payout - even after Wall Street decided the stock was worthless

egraffeo@businessinsider.com (Emily Graffeo) 

Retail traders helped spur a nearly 825% spike in Hertz last summer after it filed for bankruptcy.

They bought the stock even as Hertz said its shares could be "worthless."

Shareholders will receive a payout in Hertz's takeover bid, vindicating retail traders' instincts.

Sign up here for our daily newsletter, 10 Things Before the Opening Bell.

Long before GameStop and Reddit's Wall Street Bets became synonymous, the social-media platform was enamored of another stock: Hertz.


The car-rental company became the target of Reddit-fueled traders last summer when it announced it would file for bankruptcy. Shares of Hertz spiked as much as 825% in a matter of weeks. Wall Street onlookers were scratching their heads, wondering why retail investors were scooping up shares of a company that couldn't meet its debt obligations.

In June, retail investors who steadfastly believed that "stonks only go up" were especially excited that the billionaire investor Carl Icahn missed out on Hertz's massive rally. Icahn had sold his Hertz position at an average price of $0.72, representing a loss of more than $1.8 billion.

"Good job guys. Hertz is now a viable company again. Carl Icahn is a clown who bought high, sold low," a Wall Street Bets user commented last summer.

Even Hertz itself didn't have as much faith in its stock as the retail traders did. When the company issued more shares in June, it said its stock could be "worthless."

"We are in the process of a reorganization under chapter 11 of title 11, or Chapter 11, of the United States Code, or Bankruptcy Code, which has caused and may continue to cause our common stock to decrease in value, or may render our common stock worthless. Investing in our common stock involves a high degree of risk," the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Typically, in a corporate bankruptcy case like Hertz's, equity shareholders would receive nothing. In March, Hertz unveiled its reorganization plan, which said shareholders would receive no payout.

But on Wednesday, Hertz announced that it had accepted a $6 billion bid from a group of investors - Knighthead Capital Management, Certares Opportunities, and Apollo Capital Management - to exit bankruptcy. Knighthead's plan values Hertz at about $7.4 billion including debt, according to Bloomberg. The winning bid would pay shareholders close to $8 a share.

As part of the Hertz proposal, institutional and accredited equity investors would be given about $240 million in cash and the chance to participate in either a $1.6 billion rights offering or warrants for about 20% of the reorganized company, Bloomberg reported.

Many of the traders who speculated on Reddit likely won't qualify as institutional or accredited investors and therefore won't get new shares. But their instinct about the value of Hertz's stock turned out to be correct, even when much of Wall Street didn't believe so.

The $8 share price is higher than what any retail investor who purchased last summer paid.

Andrew Glenn, a managing partner of Glenn Agre Bergman & Fuentes who orchestrated the winning bid, told Insider the equity payout to shareholders was "unprecedented."

"Just six weeks ago, shareholders were going to get nothing, and now they're getting upwards of $8 a share," Glenn said. "That doesn't happen every day in bankruptcy. In fact, I've never seen it happen."

He added that a confluence of events had led to the success for the equity shareholders and Hertz's valuation: the V-shaped recovery, pent-up demand for travel, and a shortage of rental cars as many companies sent their cars to the used-car market during the pandemic.

"It's just a perfect storm that happened first gradually and then very quickly over the first quarter of this year and really the last two months," he said. "Our clients saw that trend happening before it unfolded, they had conviction as to the valuation, and they entered into the bankruptcy and became the mouthpiece in court for the Knighthead proposal."

Shares of Hertz extended their gains for the second day in a row on Thursday, jumping as much as 11%, to $6.36. That followed a nearly 70% surge on Wednesday.
Read the original article on Business Insider

NICE NAZI DIES
WWII secretary to Wernher von Braun dies in Alabama

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) — The World War II secretary to German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun has died in Alabama, where she spent much of her postwar life.

Dorette “Dorothea” Hertha Kersten Schlidt died Monday in Huntsville, according to a funeral home obituary. She was 100.

Born in Stargard in what is now northwestern Poland, Schlidt worked as von Braun’s secretary in the 1940s at the German rocket factory at Peenemuende, where thousands of concentration camp prisoners died in the Nazi war effort.

Heidi Weber Collier, a friend who visited with Schlidt recently, told al.com that Schlidt had been working in a law office when von Braun hired her as an aide at the complex. She helped von Braun retrieve notes and documents about the project after an Allied bombing raid, Collier said.

“He would work late at night and read out things he wanted her to type,” Collier said. “She didn’t sleep much, but they would be ready for him to review in the morning.”

It was at Peenemuende that she met Rudolf Schlidt, a guided missile expert who helped develop the Nazis' V-2 rocket, which killed thousands of civilians in Britain. The couple married in 1945, and in a then-secret U.S. effort known as Operation Paperclip, they joined hundreds of other German scientists in moving to the United States.

Schlidt now had a new, Cold War mission — developing U.S. military and space technology — and they settled in Huntsville when von Braun's team moved to Redstone Arsenal to develop the first U.S. rockets.

Rudolf Schlidt was one of the last surviving team members when he died in 2012.

The Associated Press

Wernher von Braun: History's most controversial figure ...

https://www.aljazeera.com › opinions › wernher-von-br...

May 3, 2013 — Pivotal to the history of spaceflight, von Braun's Nazi past makes him incredibly ... the government programme under which hundreds of German scientists were brought into America. ... its contents were deemed so important to the future of Germany's ... Exploring space and finding our own Pale Blue Dot.

The Right Stuff (1983) - Scott Beach as Chief Scientist - IMDb

https://www.imdb.com › title › characters

Quotes · Chief Scientist : Our Germans are better than their Germans. · 

Hundreds of Fossilized Footprints From Ancient, Bear-Sized Mammals Found in Wyoming


For years, paleontologists and paleobotanists have spent time on Wyoming’s Hanna Formation, a 58-million-year-old zone of rock in the southern part of the state that contains a wealth of fossils of marine fauna like ammonites and various forms of ancient plant life. In 2019, though, Anton Wroblewski stumbled across something new: a massive exposed trackway spanning thousands of years, marking a seaside destination for many ancient mammals in the Paleocene.

© Illustration: Anton Wroblewski Hippos and tapirs the size of bears once roamed Wyoming, and left their mark.

“The angle of the light was just right on the surface of the rock that I could see these impressions that were at very regular intervals and went for dozens and dozens of meters,” said Wroblewski, an ichnologist—someone who studies trace fossils—at the University of Utah. “I looked at them and said ‘holy cow, those are footprints.’”

 Image: Anton Wroblewski undefined
Some of the mammalian trackways, in white for the eye’s convenience.


An analysis of the trackways is published today in Scientific Reports. Following the tracks down their length, Wroblewski found they ran nearly 3,500 feet along the sandstone escarpment, about a third longer than the Burj Khalifa is tall. The tracks were splotches roughly 10 inches wide, suggesting they belonged to animals about the size of bears. The footprints were found amid trace fossils of bivalves and polychaetes (marine worms), confirming the lumbering mammals were by the seaside. These prints were left as the animals made their way across the muddy bank of the lagoon or bay that occupied the region. It’s the oldest example of large mammals taking by a marine environment.

Sixty million years ago, Earth was a boomtown for mammals. The dinosaurs were gone, leaving furry animals with the space and safety to grow bigger and proliferate. One of the places the warm-blooded creatures set up shop was what became the Hanna Formation. For millions of years, the western United States was occupied by a vast inland sea, inhabited by a vast diversity of creatures. There’s some debate as to when that Western Interior Seaway retreated, but it’s clear that some marine water was still sitting in what is today Wyoming when these mammals chose to walk through it.

As to the identity of the trackmakers, there were actually two. It’s hard to parse the (relatively) small timescales between them, but the prints were made tens of thousands of years apart. One type was probably made by a hippo-like ungulate called Coryphodon, by Wroblewski’s assessment, based on the size and shape of the five-toed print. The other mammal species was also an even-toed ungulate—an “artiodactyl,” the same order that includes bison, giraffe, and cows, among other modern mammals—but its identity is less certain. Those trackways only had four toes, which paleontologists don’t find in the fossil record until a few million years after the trace fossils in Wyoming formed.

© Graphic: Anton Wroblewski undefined

A graphic showing how the animals walked across what was once mud but is now high and dry in Wyoming.

“The molecular data suggests that these four-toed animals evolved in the Cretaceous [145 to 66 million years ago], but the body fossils say they didn’t show up until the Eocene [56 to 33.9 million years ago],” Wroblewski said. “Well now, I’ve got trace fossil evidence of something with four toes that looks like an artiodactyl or maybe a tapiroid, right in between those two age dates.”

Scientists have to make a lot of assumptions about the history of life, since only a tiny fraction of the plants and animals that have lived on Earth actually left behind a fossil. When something like these footprints comes along and shows that certain guesses were correct, well, that’s got to be satisfying.

More: Meet the Wild Creatures That Roamed Ancient Texas

The Weather Network

Who punched a hole in the clouds?
Duration: 00:55 
A strange gap in the clouds looms overhead in Sherwood Park, AB

Two in three Americans think there is intelligent life on other planets

Fred Backus 

Most Americans think we're not alone in the cosmos — a belief that has grown over the past few years. Most of those who hold this opinion also think we will make contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life within the next hundred years. And, on the topic of UFOs, most think the U.S. government knows more than it is telling the general public.

© Credit: CBSNews intelligent-life-2.jpg

Sixty-six percent of Americans now believe that there is intelligent life on other planets — an increase of 10 percentage points since the last time CBS News asked this question in 2017. As recently as 2010, fewer than half of Americans believed this was so.

© Provided by CBS News

Moreover, a third of those who believe in sentient extraterrestrial life think human contact with beings from another world will occur during their lifetime (including 10% of Americans who volunteer that we already have). Another 24% think such contact will be made within the next hundred years. Thirty-six percent think it won't happen until further into the future, while 6% think that while there is intelligent life on other planets, we will never have contact with it.

© Provided by CBS News

Though few Americans say they believe aliens have contacted us already, many more at least entertain the possibility. Fifty-one percent of Americans think UFOs — or Unidentified Flying Objects — might sometimes be the result of alien spacecrafts visiting Earth. This rises to 71% among those who believe intelligent life on other planets exists.

© Provided by CBS News

And most Americans think that whatever UFOs are, the U.S. government knows more than it's telling the general public. Just 20% think the government has told everything it knows about UFOs    

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© Provided by CBS News

This poll was conducted by telephone March 23-28, 2021 among a random sample of 1,009 adults nationwide. Data collection was conducted on behalf of CBS News by SSRS of Glen Mills, PA. Phone numbers were dialed from samples of both standard landline and cell phones.

The poll employed a random digit dial methodology. For the landline sample, a respondent was randomly selected from all adults in the household. For the cell sample, interviews were conducted with the person who answered the phone.

Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish using live interviewers. The data have been weighted to reflect U.S. Census figures on demographic variables. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus 3.6 percentage points. The error for subgroups may be higher and is available by request. The margin of error includes the effects of standard weighting procedures which enlarge sampling error slightly. This poll release conforms to the Standards of Disclosure of the National Council on Public Polls.

Rare 'Alien' Isotopes in Earth's Crust Point to Recent Brush With a Cataclysmic Event
Mike McRae

Far down in the periodic table you'll find a list of heavy elements born in chaos. The kind of chaos you might find in an exploding star perhaps, or a collision between two neutron stars. 

© MEHAU KULYK/Brand X Pictures/Getty Images

Physicists have uncovered a pair of large, still-radioactive isotopes in samples of deep-sea crust pulled up from 1,500 meters (nearly 5,000 feet) below the Pacific Ocean.

We'd expect to see many heavyweight elements in the swirl of dust and gas that formed our planet eons ago - but most should have decayed into more stable forms long before now. So finding examples in Earth's crust close to the surface today raises some interesting questions.

The finding could tell us a thing or two about cataclysmic cosmic events taking place within a few hundred light-years from Earth, and relatively recently in our geological history. It could also shine a light on the way atomic heavyweights form.

You see, building atoms takes a lot of energy. Protons can be squeezed into helium under the kind of gravity you'd find in a star, but stellar fusion will only take you so far. To build a chunky behemoth such as plutonium, you'll need the kind of energy that can deliver a machine-gun burst of neutrons.

There are a few conditions in the Universe under which this 'rapid neutron capture', or r-process, can occur, including supernovae and neutron star mergers.

Over the history of the Universe, plenty of stars have crashed and popped to spill a thick dust of iron, uranium, plutonium, gold, and other fat atoms throughout the galaxy. So it's to be expected that planets like Earth would have scooped up a good amount of them.

But not all elements are born the same. Variations in the number of their neutrons make some more stable than others. Iron 60, for example, is a 'blink and you'll miss it' kind of isotope if you view it on the cosmic scale, with a half-life of just 2.6 million years before it decays into nickel.

Finding this short-lived isotope on our planet today – especially in the crust, just out of reach of modern artificial processes – would imply a relatively recent delivery of iron fresh from the cosmos.

Iron 60 has appeared in rock samples before, dating back just a couple of million years. It's also been seen in materials brought back from the lunar surface.

But to get a good sense of the specific kind of r-process that produced these specimens, it would pay to see what other isotopes rained down with them.

Physicist Anton Wallner from the Australian National University led a team of researchers in search of new samples of iron 60 to see if they could identify isotopes of other heavy elements close by.

What they found was plutonium 244, an isotope with a half-life of just over 80 million years – stable for plutonium, but hardly the kind of element you'd expect to stick around since our planet came together 4.5 billion years ago.

In all, the team discovered two distinct influxes of iron 60 which had to have arrived within the past 10 million years. Both samples were accompanied by small but significant quantities of plutonium 244, each in a similar ratio.

Finding them together adds more detail than finding either apart. The amount of plutonium in them is lower than would be expected if supernovae were primarily responsible for their production, pointing to contributions from other r-processes.

Exactly what was behind this particular sprinkle of alien space dust is left up to our imagination for now.

"The story is complicated," says Wallner.

"Possibly this plutonium-244 was produced in supernova explosions or it could be left over from a much older, but even more spectacular event such as a neutron star detonation."

By measuring their respective radioactive fuses and making a few assumptions on the astrophysics behind their distribution, the researchers speculate the production of iron 60 is compatible with two to four supernova events going off between 50 and 100 parsecs (around 160 and 330 light years) of Earth.

This isn't the first time iron 60 has indicated a supernova taking place perilously close by in recent history.

By looking at the isotope in connection with other elements, we could slowly build a signature that tells us more about the crash-bang conditions of our neighborhood in the millions of years before humans started to pay close attention.

It'll take more hunting for alien isotopes, though.

"Our data could be the first evidence that supernovae do indeed produce plutonium-244," says Wallner.

"Or perhaps it was already in the interstellar medium before the supernova went off, and it was pushed across the Solar System together with the supernova ejecta."

This research was published in Science.

Habitat for endangered spiny softshell turtle protected southeast of Montreal

MONTREAL — The Nature Conservancy of Canada said Thursday it acquired two hectares of land southeast of Montreal to protect the habitat of the endangered spiny softshell turtle.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The conservation group said the properties along the water in Pike River, Que., about 70 kilometres southeast of Montreal, are close to one of the few known spiny softshell turtle egg-laying sites.

About 100 turtles were released into the water of the Rivière aux Brochets in Pike River on Thursday, joining more than 1,600 other turtles that have been reintroduced in the area since 2010.

Conservancy vice-president Joel Bonin said the newly protected land is critical for the future of the species that has been classified as endangered by the federal government in 2005.

Quebec Environment Minister Benoit Charette said on Thursday the provincial government gave the nature conservancy $40.1 million to help protect natural environments, and that part of that money went to purchase the two hectares of land.

"We are seeing another beautiful initiative that derives not only from the Quebec government through the projects … but also from the natural areas conservation program by the Canadian government," Charette said.

Lyne Bessette, federal Liberal member for the region, said the Canadian government wants to protect a quarter of Canada’s land and oceans by 2025. "It's important to take actions as fast as possible, for today and future generations," Bessette said.

One of the previous owners of the newly protected land in Pike River is David Gasser, whose family owned two dairy farms in the community. "We need to take care of the environment if we want it to take care of us," Gasser said.

Conservancy project coordinator Valérie René said a protected natural area offers a quieter place for turtles to grow safely.

She said that the spiny softshell turtles are slow to adapt, making it harder for them to survive in highly urbanized environments. It can take more than 12 years before a turtle’s reproduction process begins, René said.

“This gives them a protected oasis where they can continue to survive, eat and live their turtle life,” she said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published on May 13, 2021.

Virginie Ann, The Canadian Press