Alligator and bull shark swim side by side in Florida lagoon

NOT QUITE THE LAMB LAYING DOWN WITH THE LION

March 24 (UPI) -- A Florida man walking over a bridge took video when he came across an unusual sight: an alligator and a bull shark swimming side by side in a river.

Gray Vinson said he was walking on a bridge over the Indian River Lagoon in Vero Beach when he spotted the bull shark and alligator swimming in tandem just a few feet apart.

"It's not everyday you see a bull shark and a gator swimming together in the Indian River," Vinson wrote on Facebook.

Vinson said bull sharks are known to use the Indian River Lagoon as nursery rounds, but the alligator was a surprising sight, especially so close to its fellow predator.

"I was shocked to see the alligator," Vinson told CBS Miami. "I was looking to see if any of the bull sharks were there since they normally are this time of year."

Montana girl, 17, earns a doctorate in business administration

March 19 (UPI) -- A 17-year-old Montana girl who studied business administration at California Intercontinental University has become the youngest American in history to earn a doctorate.

Kimberly Strable, 17, of Great Falls, said she presented her dissertation virtually and was awarded a doctorate in business administration with an emphasis in global leadership.

"I'm the third youngest in world history to ever get a doctorate in any subject, the youngest in all world history to ever get a doctorate in business and the youngest in American history to get a doctorate in any field," Strable told KRTV.

Strable said she is looking forward to starting her career.

"Right now I'm actually working on some legal battles, discrimination I faced because of my age. So that's a really interesting part and I've actually applied some of my knowledge and I'm working on that. But after all that wraps up, I plan on trying to get into executive management," Strable said.

Strable said achieving runs in her family -- her older sister earned a master's degree just days after turning 18 and her three younger siblings have all expressed an interest in getting their degrees at a young age.

"I was just so happy and glowing. So relieved because it's been such a long journey and it's always been a next step and a next step. To finally recognize I am now officially a doctor, super amazing," she said.

Strable's graduation was celebrated on Twitter by Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobson.

"17-year-old *DOCTOR* Kimberly Strable -- that has a nice ring to it. Congratulations on hard work paying off!" Jacobson wrote.

Lake Michigan's shifting sands uncover 19th century shipwreck

March 19 (UPI) -- Dropping water levels and shifting sands revealed the remains of an 18th century shipwreck along the coast of Lake Michigan this week, according to local historians.

Valerie VanHeest, director of the Michigan Shipwreck Research Association, told WXMI-TV in Grand Rapids, Mich., the wreckage belongs to the Contest, a scow schooner that transported items including cordwood, posts, ties, stone and other general merchandise.

The Contest likely became wrecked along the shore near White Lake channel in the late 1800s due to a storm.

"We understand that there were no lives lost. The lighthouse was right there at the mouth of the channel so the crew members probably stepped off onto dry ground and took shelter in the lighthouse," VanHeest said. "They reported that the ship was a total loss."

RELATED New set of Dead Sea Scrolls recovered, first Biblical artifacts found in 60 years

The 121-foot-long ship has been uncovered periodically since its demise, and a lighthouse keeper identified it as the L.C. Woodruff when it became visible again in 1974. But in 2018, historians determined the wreckage belonged to the smaller Contest after measuring it.

Local Kerri Eriskin told WBCK-radio in Battle Creek, Mich., that they came across the wreckage while walking along the shoreline on Sunday.

"I wasn't sure what I was seeing when we visited on Sunday, but researched it later and found an article from MLive in 2018," Eriskin said. "It was pretty exciting to see remnants of the late 1800s."

SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR

Pope Francis condemns racism as a 'virus' that mutates and hides

Pope Francis condemned racism as a virus in the wake of the slaying of six Asian women in shootings at massage parlors in Atlanta and the observance of International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Photo by press office of Iraqi Prime Minister/UPI | License Photo

March 21 (UPI) -- Pope Francis condemned racism on Sunday, comparing it to a "virus" that changes and persists throughout time.

The pope did not cite any particular instance of racism, but his comments come after a gunman opened fire at three massage parlors in Atlanta last week, killing eight people including six Asian women, and on the day the United Nations observes International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

"Racism is a virus that quickly mutates and, instead of disappearing, goes into hiding, and lurks in waiting," he wrote. "Instances of racism continue to shame us, for they show that our supposed social progress is not as real or definitive as we think."

On Saturday, thousands of people gathered for a "Stop Asian Hate" rally in response to the attack on Tuesday during which Robert Aaron Long, 21, was charged with murder for targeting three Asian-owned spas in the Atlanta area.
RELATED Voices: Long history of racism fuels violence against Asian Americans



Hyun Jung Grant, 51; Xiaojie Tan, 49; Daoyou Feng, 44; Yong Ae Yue, 63; Soon Chung Park, 74; Suncha Kim, 69; Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33; and Paul Andre Michels, 54 were all shot and killed, while Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz, 30, survived the shooting but remained in critical condition.

Police said Long cited a sex addiction as the reason for the shooting but Georgia state Rep. Bee Nguyen noted the fact that the businesses were all owned by Asians and six of the victims were Asian women.

"No matter how you want to spin it the facts remain the same. This was an attack on the Asian community," said Nguyen.
RELATED Michelle Obama hopes for 'forgiveness and healing' for royal family



March 21 has also served as the day the United Nations observes International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, since 1960 when police in Sharpeville, South Africa killed 69 people at a peaceful protest against apartheid laws.

In a statement released Sunday, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi also compared the devastating impacts of racism to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Violent and deadly attacks against Black, Brown, Asian and Indigenous people, toxic language and daily and sustained racially charged acts have rightly forced painful -- but necessary -- conversations to re-examine prejudice, privilege, the way we view the world and most importantly how we act," Grandi said.

Bipartisan group of lawmakers see carbon capture as answer to climate change

Republicans are banking on the development of carbon capture so that fossil fuels can continue to play a long-term role in the nation's energy grid.

IT IS USED TO FRACK OLD WELLS

By Nico Portuondo, Medill News Service

Carbon capture is a process by which carbon dioxide is sequestered from emission sources such as power plants or directly from the atmosphere and then stored or reused. File Photo by Stephen Shaver/UPI | License Photo

WASHINGTON -- Republican members of Congress have had a busy few months lambasting President Joe Biden's early climate actions -- halting the Keystone XL pipeline and pausing oil and gas leases on federal land -- but there is one area where the president may be able to count on Republican support and still reduce global carbon emissions.

Carbon capture, a process by which carbon dioxide is sequestered from emission sources such as power plants or directly from the atmosphere and then stored or reused, has become a rare bastion of bipartisan congressional agreement on climate action. On Wednesday, lawmakers in the House and Senate, including Sens. Chris Coons, D-Del., and Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Reps. David McKinley, R-W.Va., and Marc Veasey, D-Texas, introduced a bill to provide loan guarantees from the Department of Energy to new and existing carbon capture projects.

"If we are serious about a global solution to address climate change by reducing carbon emissions, carbon capture is essential," McKinley said in an email. "It's not realistic to believe the world will transition away from fossil fuels in the next several decades."

He and Veasey also introduced last month the ACCESS 45Q Act, which would extend the 45Q policy that provides a tax credit for each metric ton of CO2 stored or reused for 10 years.
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The goal of carbon capture technology is to sequester carbon dioxide and then store it in geological formations so that there is less carbon in the atmosphere that can contribute to climate change.

At the moment, carbon capture mainly happens at emissions centers such as power plants and cement factories, but technology is being developed that can take carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere. Biden's climate plan explicitly calls for the acceleration and deployment of carbon capture technology.

At first glance, it makes sense that both Republicans and Democrats would support the further development of this technology.

RELATED EPA relaunches climate change website

Republican lawmakers, especially those from fossil fuel powerhouse states, such as Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., see it as an opportunity to continue to back the traditional energy use while still addressing the potential climate consequences.

"My advocacy is really for energy and energy independence in our country from all sources, traditional and renewable," Hoeven said in a phone interview. "Carbon capture is how we can continue to produce energy from all sources."

Most Democrats are happy to support any technology that could reduce CO2 in the atmosphere and see carbon capture as potentially vital to the climate change fight.

RELATED Seaweed could reduce levels of methane cows belch into the atmosphere

"I think most, if not all, realistic climate modeling shows we are going to not only need to get emissions down to net zero, we're still going to need to be able to pull carbon dioxide out of the air," said a staffer for Sen. Tina Smith, a member of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, an affiliate of the Democratic Party.

Even if Biden's goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 is fully met and other countries honor their carbon emission reduction commitments, many scientists say that climate change could still have devastating impacts unless some of the CO2 already in the atmosphere is removed.

Despite the bipartisan enthusiasm, carbon capture at the moment is nowhere near a comprehensive solution to climate change.

There are 21 carbon capture facilities around the world that can capture and store around 32 million tons of CO2. Current global CO2 emissions are around 36 billion tons a year, meaning that three orders of magnitude need to be made up for the technology to fully address the problem.

This is where Republicans and Democrats start to differ. Most Democrats see divesting in fossil fuels and implementing renewable energy quickly as the most important steps to take, with carbon removal playing a role in the future of climate change action, but is not the main solution to global warming.

Republicans, on the other hand, are banking on the development of carbon capture so that fossil fuels can continue to play a long-term role in the nation's energy grid.

"Some people are just anti-fossil fuel," Hoeven said. "But, you know, the question I say is why not produce from all these sources, particularly if we're able to address the whole greenhouse gas issue."

Novel coronavirus likely was circulating in October 2019, U.S. researchers say

NOT FAKE NEWS BUT....RED BAITING PROPAGANDA AGAINST CHINA...

OK FAKE NEWS PROBABLY PLANTED BY THE ILLUMINA(TEE)

University of California-San Diego, the University of Arizona and Illumina Inc.  

said in a report  

Cases of the novel coronavirus first reported in Wuhan, China, 

in December 2019 may have emerged in nearby areas earlier

 in the year, according to new U.S. research. 

File Photo by Stephen Shaver/UPI | License Photo

March 19 (UPI) -- The novel coronavirus first reported in the central Chinese city of Wuhan may have infected people as early as mid-October 2019, according to research from a team of U.S. scientists.

Researchers at the University of California-San Diego, the University of Arizona and Illumina Inc. said in a report published Thursday in journal Science that the virus possibly was circulating for at least two months in China before Chinese authorities alerted the World Health Organization on Dec. 31, 2019.

While the WHO has yet to release its official report on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, researchers say molecular clock evolutionary analyses can trace the virus' first appearance.

The senior author of the study was Joel Wertheim, an associate professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at University of California-San Diego School of Medicine.

"We employed a coalescent framework to combine retrospective molecular clock inference with forward epidemiological simulations to determine how long SARS-CoV-2 could have circulated prior to the time of the most recent common ancestor," the report said.

"Our results define the period between mid-October and mid-November 2019 as the plausible interval when the first case of SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Hubei province," it added.

A molecular clock is a method that determines the mutation rate of genes to deduce when two or more life forms diverge, according to UC San Diego. In the case of the coronavirus, the common ancestor of all SARS-CoV-2 variants had appeared by November, the report said.

But Michael Worobey at the University of Arizona said the first cases of the disease most likely emerged even before the appearance of a common ancestor.

"The index case can conceivably predate the common ancestor -- the actual first case of this outbreak may have occurred days, weeks or even many months before the estimated common ancestor," said Worobey, a co-author and a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

Scientists also used epidemic simulations to understand the early phase of the pandemic.

RELATED Expert: COVID-19 vaccine concerns mostly unfounded

Experiments showed only 29.7% of simulated epidemics went on to become "self-sustaining epidemics."

"The remaining 70.3% of epidemics went extinct," scientists said.

Illumina, Inc.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumina,_Inc.

Jump to navigationJump to search

Illumina, Inc.

Type	Public
Traded as	Nasdaq: ILMN NASDAQ-100 Component S&P 500 Component
Industry	Biotechnology
Founded	1998
Founder	David Walt Larry Bock John Stuelpnagel Anthony Czarnik Mark Chee
Headquarters	San Diego, California ,  U.S.
Key people	Francis deSouza (President & CEO) Jay Flatley (Executive Chairman) Sam Samad (CFO)
Products	NovaSeq 6000, HiSeq X, HiSeq 4000, MiSeq, MiSeqDx, MiniSeq, iSeq 100, NextSeq 550, NextSeq 550Dx, iScan
Revenue	US$3.33 billion (2018)
Operating income	US$883 million (2018)
Net income	US$826 million (2018)
Number of employees	~7,300
Website	www.illumina.com
Footnotes / references [1]

Illumina, Inc. is an American company. Incorporated in April 1998, Illumina develops, manufactures, and markets integrated systems for the analysis of genetic variation and biological function. The company provides a line of products and services that serves the sequencing, genotyping and gene expression, and proteomics markets. Its headquarters are located in San Diego, California.

Illumina's technology had purportedly by 2014 reduced the cost of sequencing a human genome to US$1,000, down from a price of $1 million in 2007.^[2] Customers include genomic research centers, pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions, clinical research organizations, and biotechnology companies.

 Tony Perkins to Newsmax TV: 

Dems Want to Force Americans to Fund Abortion

QUOTED IN SUSAN PAGE'S BIO OF BARBARA BUSH

LAST TIME I CHECKED SHE WAS A REPUBLICAN

MARX ON TRADES UNIONS

 

Medium offers entire editorial staff buyouts

WHEN A UNION DRIVE FAILS

BY THOMAS MOORE - 03/24/21 THE HILL
© iStock

Editorial staff at the self-publishing platform Medium are being offered buyouts and its vice president of editorial content is leaving the company as it once again retools its approach to creating its own journalistic content, CEO Ev Williams announced Tuesday.

“I also want to give an option to those who would rather get off this crazy ride,” Williams wrote in a blog post, after detailing some of the changes. “To that end, we’re offering to everyone in editorial a voluntary separation program (VSP).”

Staff members that decide to leave, Williams said, will get a lump sum payment equal to five months' salary and six months of health benefits. The staff has until April 2 to make a decision.

Williams also announced that Medium’s VP of editorial, Siobhan O’Connor, “has decided this time of transition is her time to move on.” The company is working out when her last day will be.

Jermaine Hall and Scott Lamb are now in charge of content, Williams said, and they both report to Karene Tropen, who has been given the new role of SVP of marketing and content.

The buyouts come less than a month after an attempt to unionize Medium’s editorial workers failed to win enough support. Neither O’Connor nor the representatives from the Medium Workers Union immediately commented on William’s post.

The buyouts are just the most recent of several shifts the self-publishing platform has made in its approach to producing its own content, Williams acknowledged.

“Though Medium has been an open platform since day one, we’ve had an editorial team almost as long. The original thesis was that we wanted to establish that Medium was both open and high quality,” he wrote.

“We wanted to set the bar high. We were successful in doing that, and, since then, the editorial part of our company has gone through many iterations as we’ve strived to find the right way to integrate it. In 2014–16, we published great original content but we didn’t have the right business model to support it,” he added.

However, he added, the most recent iteration wasn’t financially successful.

“We have published many stellar stories that found a wide audience and more than paid for themselves. But our hit rate has been low, and we’re not near where we need to be to make it work economically,” he wrote.

While the overall customer base for Medium grew, he added, the audience for the company’s publications did not, reflecting a trend that media brands matter less now than individual voices.

Williams did not say how the platform will approach publishing its own content from now on, only that it will have to “experiment more efficiently than we have been to date.”

“I can see more focused, high-affinity publications working well as part of the Medium bundle,” he added. “And I can also see the editorial team being great at conceiving and executing those types of publications.”

A California tree nursery's Supreme Court fight has far-reaching implications for property owners

BY ILYA SOMIN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 03/24/21 

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

© Getty Images

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, an important property rights case. Cedar Point could set a major precedent determining whether the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment requires the government to compensate property owners when it forces them to give outside private parties extensive access to their land. If the state prevails, government would have broad power to force property owners to allow outsiders onto their property. That power can be abused easily in many ways. Fortunately, if the oral argument is any indication, the justices seem likely to rule in favor of property rights.

In Cedar Point, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that a California law requiring agricultural growers to give union organizers access to their property for three hours per day, 120 days per year, did not automatically create a taking requiring “just compensation” under the Takings Clause. The state mandated union-organizer access so that the organizers could try to persuade the growers’ farmworkers to join their unions. The Ninth Circuit ruled there was no taking because state regulations did not require owners to give union organizers the right to “unpredictably traverse their property 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.” Thus, there is no “permanent physical occupation” of property, of the sort required by Supreme Court precedent for this to be considered a “per se” (automatic) taking, as opposed to one subject to a complex balancing test established in the 1978 Penn Central case. That test is notoriously vague and manipulable, and usually comes out in favor of the government.

The issue comes down to whether a “permanent physical occupation” occurs only when it is literally continuous, or when the right to occupy continues indefinitely but does not apply to all hours of the day, all the time. The right to exclude unwanted entrants is a central element of property rights in the Anglo-American legal tradition. It is hard to argue that a major restriction on it is not a taking of property rights.

During the Founding era and the 19th century, the power to exclude was recognized as an important aspect of property rights. Government violations of that right generally were understood to be takings, except in some cases where the violation was necessary to prevent the owner from engaging in activities that threatened public health and safety. Scholars such as University of San Diego’s Michael Rappaport and George Mason University’s Eric Claeys have shown that there is a strong originalist justification for classifying even many regulatory restrictions that do not involve physical occupation of property rights as takings, especially when we focus on the original meaning of the Takings Clause as of the time that the Fourteenth Amendment “incorporated” it and the rest of the Bill of Rights against state and local governments in 1868 (a methodology favored by a wide range of originalists). The case is even stronger when the government actually requires owners to accept physical trespass on their land.

Cedar Point has implications that go far beyond the union organizing context. If California prevails, it could allow the government to impose a wide range of access requirements on owners without paying compensation. During the oral argument, several justices pointed out that, under California’s reasoning, any access requirement that lasts fewer than 365 days per year or does not cover all daylight hours would not be a per se taking. Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted that it would enable states to require a homeowner to allow demonstrations on her land, so long as the protestors are allowed to come only “120 days a year and three hours at a time.” Even liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor — the justice usually least sympathetic to takings claims — emphasized that “we need something that gives clear guidance” and was reluctant to relegate the case to the Penn Central test, because that test “fails to capture the significant interests in the right to exclude at stake in physical invasion cases.”

FALACIOUS ARGUMENT IF THE RED STATES COULD USE THIS THEY WOULD HAVE

The union-organizer context makes it easy to view this in crude left v. right or labor v. management terms. But if the Supreme Court rules against the property owners, conservative “red state” governments can easily use the same power for their own ends. For example, they could use it to compel abortion clinics to grant access to pro-life activists who seek to persuade patients and medical personnel that abortion is murder. Similarly, they could force businesses and other organizations that ban guns on their premises to give regular access to gun rights activists, as long as it is “only” for a few hours per day, 120 days per year.

THE BOSSES ARE ALWAYS WORRIED ABOUT THE UNION IMPACT ON WORKERS

IT IS SUCH A BURDEN ON THEM

Allowing states to mandate outsider access to workplaces often will harm workers’ interests more than it benefits them. If union organizers are able to enter on a regular basis, disrupting work and potentially worsening employer-employee relations, that would predictably increase the cost of hiring these types of agricultural workers. Employers are likely to react by hiring fewer such workers, offering lower pay and benefits, or some combination of both. Similar harms to workers may arise if state governments are generally allowed to give outsiders the right to access workplaces without employers’ consent, and without paying compensation. Such disruption can easily harm workers in a wide range of enterprises.

During oral argument, some justices worried that, if Cedar Point wins, recurring government health and safety inspections of businesses might qualify as takings. Joshua Thompson, counsel for the property owners, addressed this issue by noting that, under the common law, property owners have no right to exclude “reasonable” government inspections and searches. A better answer is that inspections meant to protect health and safety fall within the police power — the government’s authority to protect health and safety. Such uses of the police power are not generally considered takings under either the original meaning of the Takings Clause or subsequent precedent. By contrast, a general right of union organizers to enter property does not come within the police power exception. And the same goes for other types of recurring government-mandated intrusions that are not health and safety measures.

One of the main purposes of constitutional property rights is to protect owners against state-mandated trespasses of all kinds, regardless of ideology. Labor unionists, pro-lifers and others have every right to try to persuade people to join them. But if the government forces private property owners to give them access, it thereby takes private property and must pay compensation. That rule protects property owners of all types and makes it easier for people of different views to coexist in a diverse society.

Ilya Somin is a professor of law at George Mason University and author of “Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration and Political Freedom” and “The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain.” His wife, Alison Somin, is an employee of the Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents the property owners in the Cedar Point case. She is not personally involved in the case. Follow him on Twitter @IlyaSomin.