'Not to pursue an extension'

Talk about getting lucky

'The five of us all thought that she was a good witness

The claim was originally posted by a satirical website debunked previously. 

As far as modern-day blues goes, few do it better than Kirk Fletcher, a native of Bellflower, California, whose style is steeped in an amalgam of Chicago and West Coast blues. If you’ve heard his records, I’m Here & I’m Gone (1999), Shades of Blue (2003), My Turn (2010), Burning Blues (Live at the Baked Potato) (2014), Hold On (2018), My Blues Pathway (2020), and his most recent, Heartache by The Pound (2022), surely, you’ve caught the vibe. And the word is that Fletcher is working on his neck, though yet-to-be-announced, record. In the meantime, he’s laying low, doing his The post An Interview With Kirk Fletcher Talking Guitars And Amps appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Even as the scandal around the Brazilian authorities’ policy of issuing censorship orders to X was in full swing, they continued to send letters to US-based platforms demanding more censorship. This is revealed in new documents published by the US House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, a part of a broader interim report titled, “The Attack on Free Speech Abroad and the Biden Administration’s Silence: The Case Of Brazil.” “Part 2” of this report states that as recently as in April, X, but also Rumble, received a total of ten orders (nine of which went to the latter platform) to censor accounts. Both companies refused to comply. The freshly targeted accounts belong to one of the country’s top podcasters, Monark (“Brazil’s Joe Rogan”), but also prominent opposition figures, parliamentarians, political commentators, radio stations, and even a gospel singer. What they all have in common is questioning the integrity of Brazil’s 2022 presidential election, and/or supporting the incumbent who lost the contested ballot, Jair Bolsonaro. Meanwhile, the latest known batch of censorship letters was justified by linking Bolsonaro supporters and election integrity skeptics with the events of January 8, 2023 – the “Brazilian version” of January 6 in the US – and accusing them of “spreading disinformation.” In addition to demanding that the accounts be suspended within two hours, the platforms were threatened with daily fines equivalent to some $19,700. The censorship demands were very thorough: the accounts were to be blocked, preserved, and demonetized, with payments to them stopped. X and Rumble were also supposed to provide Brazilian authorities with data pertaining to registration, and payouts. In announcing the release of the newly obtained documents, the House Select Subcommittee pointed out the role of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court President and Supreme Federal Court justice Alexandre de Moraes. But, the Subcommittee – set up to investigate government-Big Tech collusion and what it calls government-directed censorship at home, made sure to note that the phenomenon is not confined to Brazil and other countries. “Like Brazil, the Biden Administration has attacked journalists, political opponents, and Americans across the political spectrum in an attempt to silence the Administration’s many critics,” a press release said. The post House Committee Report Unveils Recent Brazil Social Media Censorship Demands As Recently as April 2024 appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Will the GOP Be Able to Keep Noncitizens Out of the Census?

Saying hello comes with a range of possible gestures and vocalizations – from a wave of greeting to a hug as you draw closer or a shout to get the attention of your friend after you’ve got a good table at a busy pub. Now, the same can be said of the elephant world: African elephants (Loxodonta africana) can change their greetings to one another based on whether the other elephant is paying attention. Using more than just one type of greeting at the same time is known as multimodal communication. These elephants have a whole range of communication options, with combinations of ear movements, tactile signals, or different vocalizations. The most frequently used vocalization is a rumble, which includes information about the identity of the elephant making the noise.By studying semi-captive savannah elephants living in the Jafuta Reserve, Zimbabwe, the team witnessed 89 greeting events, which included 1,282 greeting behaviors. Of these behaviors, 1,014 were physical greetings while the remaining 268 were vocalizations. Combinations of gestures and vocalizations were used between elephants greeting each other, including ear flapping and rumbling, which was the most common combination of greeting. The second most commonly seen combo was rumble with ears stiff. The team think that this ear gesture, as well as ears slightly spread apart, might facilitate hearing a response from the other elephant.Seemingly less pleasant forms of greeting, such as peeing and pooping as well as sweat gland secretions, were used in 71 percent of greetings. The researchers think this might mean that smell plays into elephant communication more than was previously thought.                    Elephants also varied which greeting combo they used based on whether the elephant they wanted to greet was looking at them. If the other elephant was looking away, the approaching elephant was more likely to use vocalization, gestures that produced a noise, or give them a prod with the end of their trunk.                    Interestingly, the team found that the females in the study greeted each other in a way that was consistent with previous observations of closely bonded wild elephants or related zoo elephants. Meanwhile, the males in the study used the same combinations of greetings as the females, which is not typically seen in other studies – wild male elephants usually only rumble or raise their trunks to smell other elephants. The purpose of these elaborate social greetings is thought to be to strengthen social bonds and promote recognition, including during female reunions and, in this study, between closely bonded males. The paper is published in Communications Biology.

Playing dead and spewing blood gets the job done for feinting dice snakes, who have evolved a dramatic but effective way of putting would-be predators off their meal. They’ll stop at nothing, with autohaemorrhaging, convulsive twisting, and even smearing themselves with shit all on the cards.The impressive performance comes from Natrix tessellata, a semiaquatic species that mostly eat fish and can be found hunting for them across western Europe, northern Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia to Western China. When it’s not hunting, it’s prey for a wide variety of predators including other reptiles, birds, and mammals.With so many on your tail, it pays to employ more than one kind of antipredator defense, and several species exhibit a complex array of “don’t eat me" strategies. Death feigning is what the authors of a new study describe as an “especially interesting” antipredator defense, not least because it's a risky strategy to resist fleeing – and it’s one that the dice snake excels in.When it looks like the chips are down, their swansong involves a combination of lying motionless in an “I am deceased” posture, smearing themselves with feces and musk, and autohaemorrhaging – a weird trick where animals willingly bleed. The researchers wanted to test if the combination of all these dramatic displays makes for a more convincing (and therefore more effective) go at death feigning, and so they tested 263 dice snakes in the field.Dice snakes really go the extra mile when it comes to playing dead.Image credit: © V Bjelica, A Golubović, Biology Letters 2024They grabbed dice snakes by the mid-body and immediately saw the animals starting to coat themselves in fecal matter and musk, a smearing behavior that’s thought to put off the predator by making its prey repulsive. They then handled the snakes in a way that mimicked what a predator might do, before placing them down – unharmed – on the floor.The death feigning kicked in once the snakes were on the ground, as the animals’ mouths lolled open, tongues flaccid. They then timed the death feigning duration, and noted if anything else happened, such as blood dripping from the snakes’ mouths, before identifying their age and sex and letting them go.The results showed that older snakes were more likely to combine the smearing of feces and musk with feigning dead, and that they tended to spend less time playing dead compared to younger snakes. The researchers suggest this indicates that these behaviors have synergistic effects, making the more complex performances more believable so that the predator is tricked and abandons its disgusting dead meal.There are some limitations to the findings in that the snakes’ behaviors weren’t made in response to real prey-predator interactions, but it’s a curious insight into the complex ways in which animals have evolved to get out of a bind.Sophisticated, even if it does leave you covered in your own poop.The study is published in the journal Biology Letters.

Japan has added fin whales – a marine mammal that’s vulnerable to extinction – to its list of commercial whaling species in a move that conservationists have dubbed “an appalling step backwards”.The Government of Japan announced on May 9 that fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) are fair game for whalers within the country’s exclusive economic zone, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency (IEA). The inclusion of fin whales brings the number of commercial whaling species in Japan to four, along with minke whales, Bryde’s whales, and sei whales. The latest addition is particularly shocking due to the size and scarcity of the species. Measuring up to 25 meters (85 feet) in length, fin whales are the second-largest animal on earth in terms of length, second only to the blue whale. These majestic creatures can live up to 90 years old and have a cosmopolitan range across much of the world’s oceans. They were listed as "endangered" by the IUCN until 2018, although their status has since been updated to "vulnerable." Their population has roughly doubled since the 1970s, primarily thanks to bans on commercial whaling that allowed their numbers to bounce back. However, Japan now threatens to start undoing that progress. “This is an appalling step backwards and the latest desperate effort by the Government of Japan to stimulate an almost non-existent consumer demand for whale meat in Japan, in order to justify having built a new whale-killing factory ship, at taxpayers’ expense, which could tie Japan into decades more of this destructive, unsustainable, inhumane and outdated industry,” Clare Perry, a Senior Ocean Adviser at the EIA, said in a statement.“Fin whales are one of Earth’s great carbon capturers and should be fully protected, not least so that they can continue to fulfil their critical role in the marine environment,” explained Perry. Japan resumed commercial whaling in June 2019 after its controversial withdrawal from the International Whaling Commission (IWC), the intergovernmental panel that regulates the whaling industry.Commercial whaling has been banned since the IWC’s moratorium in 1982, although it continued to allow countries to kill whales for special purposes, such as scientific research and Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling.Over 80 nations signed the agreement that came into being in 1986. However, several countries – namely Norway, Denmark/Greenland, Russia, Iceland, and Japan – continued to flout the ban and hunt whales under the guise of scientific research.“Japan now proposes to kill the second largest animal on the planet, despite the global ban on commercial whaling and the nation’s legal duty to cooperate with the IWC, mandated by customary international law and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea,” added Perry.