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Slog AM: Firefighter Charged in Sawant Email Threat Case, NASA Rover to Land on Mars, Cruz Vacays as Texans Freeze – TheStranger.com

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This man gets more and more vile with every passing day. Getty Pool

Let’s start our morning looking to the heavens: NASA’s Perseverance rover journeyed 293 million miles over the past seven months to our twin red planet, Mars. It’s scheduled to touch down on Mars’s dusty surface at around 12:55 p.m. PST inside the Jezero Crater. It will apparently take seven minutes for the $2.4 billion rover to complete the landing process, what NASA has called “seven minutes of terror.” Once it’s landed (fingers crossed), Perseverance will search for signs of microbes, collect rocks in hopes of finding “biosignatures,” and carry around a mini-helicopter for NASA to fly around for it’s first controlled flight on another planet. The live broadcast starts at 11:15 a.m.!

356-foot fishing vessel in the Port of Tacoma erupted into flames last night: Firefighters battled the blaze on the Aleutian Falcon for several hours, extinguishing the majority of the fire by 5:15 a.m. Officials were concerned about the reported 48,000 gallons diesel fuel and 10,000 pounds of ammonia onboard the ship catching on fire, which thankfully did not. There have been no reported injuries.

Malia Obama and Donald Glover join forces: The eldest Obama daughter landed a writing role on one of Glover’s untitled forthcoming projects, according to Vulture. This news comes after Glover reportedly signed an eight figure overall multiyear deal with Amazon Studios. Of course, the Biden cultural era would be shaped by an Obama.

Texas is still suffering from the extreme winter weather: Half a million people are still without power in the Lone Star state. Scores of Texans were sent boil water notices after water systems across the state became paralyzed due to the loss of power. Relief is still, unbelievably, days away as some resort to burning furniture in order to stay warm and try to brace themselves for yet another winter storm.

And Senator Ted Cruz? He’s in Cancún! Though his office has not yet responded to multiple requests for comment, AP confirmed that images of the wormy senator traveling to warmer climates were indeed taken while Texas shivered in the cold. He’s pathetic!

Not the turtles! Volunteers in Texas are rescuing thousands of “cold-stunned” turtles as the region is hit with a historic winter storm over this past week. Sea Turtle, Inc., the organization behind the rescue effort, had to get creative with housing, keeping these gentle sea creatures warm by placing them in plastic kiddie pools, tarps, and boxes.

Point Roberts residents: Will no longer be required to show a negative COVID-19 test negative when traveling to Canada “for essential services,” says Daddy Inslee.

Seattle Police Department release body cam footage from Tuesday’s shooting: Here we are again. Two nights ago, SPD shot and killed a man in crisis near the waterfront on Alaskan Way. The victim wielded a knife and threatened to cut his own throat. SPD claims that Port of Seattle Police tried to use a less-lethal tool but the device was “ineffective”—though watching the footage, it’s unclear what tool was used. With knife in hand, the victim approached a SPD police officer asking him to “do it” and “please kill me” before the officer shoots and kills him. You can watch the disturbing video here, but be warned, it’s graphic.

Facebook blocks Australian users from sharing or viewing news content on its platform, causing an uproar: All major and local news outlets were blocked from the social media site Thursday morning. The drastic move is in response to a proposed law that would “make tech giants pay for news content on their platforms.” While behemoths like Facebook and Google claim that it unfairly penalizes them, lawmakers believing the proposed bill would level the playing field for smaller publishers.

Naomi Osaka beat Serena Williams 6-4, 6-3 at the Australian Open: I don’t really care about sports, but I wanted both of these icons to somehow win.

OK, ugh, did anyone else see the Cruella de Vil origin story trailer? Others have rightly pointed out that Disney’s Cruella starring Emma Stone as the eponymous character feels a little Joker-meets-girlboss. My first thought is that Stone’s accent reminds me Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen which isn’t a compliment! [embedded content]

Charges came down for Seattle firefighter at the center of Sawant email threat case: Andrew Finseth has been charged with second degree identity theft and two counts of misdemeanor cyberstalking, says CHS Blog. Finseth was arrested on Friday for allegedly using another firefighter’s email to send threatening emails to Councilmember Sawant. He has yet to enter a plea in the case.

Another 861,000 Americans applied for unemployment last week: A reflection of our pandemic-afflicted job market, this number is 100,000 claims more than economists predicted and has not meaningful improved in months. On top of that, 516,299 Americans filed claims through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, bringing total first-time claims to 1.4 million last week. Continued jobless claims stood at 4.5 million.

Seattle will pay $10,000 in encampment removal case: To Ada Yeager, who sued the city in federal court in December over its plan to remove her from her tent in Cal Anderson where she had been living since last June. Her lawsuit argued that “giving Yeager and others 48-hours notice to remove their belongings from the park violated their civil rights through ‘warrantless seizure and destruction of personal property,’ among other claims.” Sydney Brownstone has more on the case over at the Seattle Times.

And now for the weather: More rain!

Prince Philip is in the hospital: The 99 year old was admitted as a “precautionary measure” after not feeling well. Before you ask, it’s probably not COVID.

CNN’s Chris Cuomo can’t cover his brother, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, anymore: Though the governor appeared on his brother’s TV show early on in the pandemic, a CNN spokesperson confirmed that the Cuomo-on-Cuomo coverage ban is back in place.

That being said, Gov. Cuomo isn’t doing so hot right now: Andy and his coronavirus task force is currently under investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office over his handling of COVID-19 nursing home deaths. No allegation of wrongdoing has been made yet, but the feds are looking into his delaying of data regarding COVID-19 long-term care facility deaths. This is on top of an effort in the New York state Assembly to repeal Cuomo’s emergency pandemic powers. Do the #Resistance mommies think he’s still competent and sexy?


Love Slog AM/PM?

I could not stop laughing at this headline: “Man, 32, offered Covid jab because NHS thought he was 6cm tall giving him BMI of 28,000.

OneBusAway gets an iOS update that’s ready for beta testing: This open source software has saved my butt! You can try out the beta version of the app using Apple’s TestFlight, which you can download from the App Store on your iPhone. For an explainer on what’s new, OneBusAway developer Aaron Brethorst has a blog post here.

For your listening pleasure: “Not About You (Extended Mix)” by Honey Dijon featuring Hadiya George. [embedded content]

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Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South

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More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.

That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.

“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”

The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.

Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.

Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.

Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.

Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.

“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”

The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.

North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.

Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”

Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.

Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.

For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.

“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”

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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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‘Big Sam’: Paleontologists unearth giant skull of Pachyrhinosaurus in Alberta

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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.

On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.

They call it “Big Sam.”

The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

It didn’t die alone.

“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.

She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”

“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.

The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.

The discovery was a long time coming.

The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.

“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.

When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”

“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.

Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.

About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.

Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.

“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.

“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”

The genders of the two adults are unknown.

Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.

The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.

She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.

“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.

“It’s pretty exciting.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair

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TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.

Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.

Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.

The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.

The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.

It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.

Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.

Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.

Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.

Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.

Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.

The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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