00x Final Filter
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Virginia Democrats are clearly panicking. Rachael Bade, co-host of The Huddle, elaborated on what former Democratic Party operative and fellow co-host Dan Turrentine mentioned this week about the fate of the Old Dominion’s new congressional map. It grants Democrats a 10-1 advantage, but the state Supreme Court refused to dismiss the challenge to the map, setting the stage for serious intra-party battles.
The legal warnings were reportedly repeated endlessly, but to no effect. Now, Democratic leaders at both the Virginia and national levels could face a heavy setback if the maps are invalidated. Bade outlined the criteria the court could use to strike down the maps. Sure, the map might get approved, but if the Virginia Supreme Court sides with just one of these points, the map is cooked:
AND THE KNIVES ARE OUT FOR SOME BIG NAMES. Per Dan’s reporting, Governor ABIGAIL SPANBERGER’s staff is quietly sniping at state Senate majority leader SCOTT SUROVELL and state Senate kingmaker LOUISE LUCAS — two lawmakers who pushed back hardest on the legal warnings last fall.
[…]
If this effort goes down, those quotes won’t age well. “People are lining up behind the scenes to go public, I think, very quickly if this does not go through,” Dan foreshadowed.
BUT HERE’S THE THING — Pointing fingers won’t let Spanberger off the hook, which we discussed at length on the show. Yes, she may have privately raised concerns about the effort early on. But she’s the one in the ads. She’s the face of this thing. As our other co-host SEAN SPICER put it bluntly: “She ate the political cookie on this one.”
The other name in the crosshairs if this goes down? House Minority Leader HAKEEM JEFFRIES. Dan is already hearing from some Virginia Dems who say the Democratic leader pushed too hard despite legal concerns. (Though, let’s be fair to Jeffries — he would have been slammed by the party if he hadn’t leaned in, and his team would likely wear such criticism as a badge of honor.)
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FDA Officials have blocked publication of several studies supporting the safety of widely used vaccines against Covid-19 and shingles in recent months, a DHS spokesman confirmed.
The studies, which cost millions of dollars in public funds, were conducted by scientists at the agency, who worked with data firms to analyze millions of patient records. They found serious side effects to be very rare.
In October, the scientists were directed to withdraw two Covid-19 vaccine studies that had been accepted for publication in medical journals. In February, top F.D.A. officials did not sign off on submitting abstracts about studies of Shingrix, a shingles vaccine, to a major drug safety conference.
The withdrawal of the studies is the latest step by the administration to try to limit access to vaccines. It has sharply cut research funding for vaccine development, released unvetted information casting doubt on vaccines, and blocked other information supporting their safety, most recently a paper on Covid vaccine effectiveness by career scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Your Majesty,
We’ve both had a very busy week. While you enjoyed the pageantry of your American state visit, red carpets, garden parties, and carefully staged moments of compassion, I stood outside the White House with a chair reserved for you – waiting. Not as a spectacle. Not as a stunt. But as a survivor asking to be seen.
I prepared that moment with care. I studied the traditions you value – Darjeeling tea, cucumber sandwiches, the details that matter in your world. In mine, what matters is this: You didn’t show up.
Your visit celebrated 250 years of America’s history. I watched as you stepped onto American soil, greeted with flower bouquets as the red carpets rolled out for you. I hoped you had heard about my efforts.
While you met President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania attending cultural engagements, mingling with those who sit in power, I amplified unheard voices, preserving stories, standing with people who have nothing, who have been ignored for too long. You missed the opportunity to be a king who could’ve been remembered as the one who stood alongside us in this pivotal moment where abuses of power are coming to light.
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A coalition of civil rights groups has filed suit to stop a new law allowing Texas law enforcement to return illegal aliens to a port of entry and arrest them for unlawful entry.
According to Just the News, the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Texas, and the Texas Civil Rights Project filed a class-action lawsuit on Monday seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to block the law.
Senate Bill 4, which makes illegal entry into Texas a state crime, is set to take effect next week after a federal appeals court vacated a lower court ruling last week that had prevented its enforcement since 2024.
The new law also authorized state magistrates to order certain individuals to leave the country if they are convicted.
Just the News reports that after the bill was signed into law in 2023, multiple groups sued, arguing the law is unconstitutional and a district court and panel of Fifth Circuit judges agreed.
The class-action lawsuit names the Texas Department of Public Safety and its director as defendants and calls for a restraining order and to block four key provisions of SB 4.
NEW: The ACLU OF Texas and its partners file a new class-action lawsuit challenging S.B. 4 —Seeking a restraining order and preliminary injunction to block several provisions of the legislation.
Via The ACLU of Texas:
“S.B. 4 would allow local and state law enforcement to…— Ali Bradley (@AliBradleyTV) May 4, 2026
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… Why scientists blamed oxygen in the first placeInsects don’t breathe as we do. No lungs are involved. Instead, they have a system of tiny branching tubes, called tracheoles, which carry oxygen directly to the muscles by diffusion. The efficiency of diffusion decreases over longer distances, so scientists thought there was a hard limit to how big an insect could get, and that limit increased with more oxygen in the air.In 2010, a study Atmospheric oxygen level and the evolution of insect body size, identified several plausible mechanisms linking tracheal oxygen delivery to insect body size, and the case for high oxygen levels enabling prehistoric gigantism seemed well supported. It was a clean story: more oxygen, bigger bugs. Everybody moved on. However, the new research published in Nature suggests the clean story may have been wrong.
Scientists have studied griffinfly for decades, but the mystery of what made them so enormous just got deeper. Image Credits: Google Gemini
What researchers found when they looked closer, actuallyA team led by Edward Snelling of the University of Pretoria used high-powered electron microscopy to examine exactly how much space tracheoles actually occupy within insect flight muscles. The answer? Hardly any. Tracheoles make up about 1 per cent or less of the flight muscle in most insect species, and that pattern holds true for the ancient griffinflies.
That’s a surprisingly low footprint. In contrast, the capillaries in the heart muscle of birds and mammals occupy about ten times more relative space than the tracheoles in insect flight muscle. If oxygen transport really was the bottleneck limiting insect size, you’d expect evolution to have packed in far more tracheoles, especially during a period when giant insects were thriving. It didn’t.So, what actually made them so huge?Now here is where it gets really mysterious. No one knows for sure. The oxygen theory has been called into question, but nothing has come along to cleanly replace it.
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Former ICE official Madison Sheahan lost a GOP primary in a battleground Ohio House district on Tuesday, a relief to Republicans who worried she could sabotage their chances of flipping the seat.
Former state Rep. Derek Merrin won the GOP nomination in the 9th Congressional District for the second cycle in a row, and will face Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur in November. He lost to Kaptur by less than one percentage point in 2024.
Republicans see the seat as a prime pickup opportunity after the Ohio legislature redrew the state’s congressional map to make the district more favorable for Republicans.
Merrin’s victory comes with a sigh of relief from Republicans in the state who raised concerns about Sheahan’s background — she served as former deputy ICE director under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — being a soft target for Kaptur in a general election.
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The war with Iran has once again raised questions about Washington’s ability to prioritize its interests in East Asia and particularly to manage intensifying competition with Beijing. Furthermore, the war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have presented American and Chinese leaders with new challenges and potential opportunities, as they respond to the war’s global impacts. We asked five experts to address how the war is shaping competition between Washington and Beijing.
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Rising stock markets along with growth in pension and provident fund savings have generated unprecedented wealth for the Israeli public in the past few years. According to Bank of Israel figures released last week, at the beginning of 2026 (February) the Israeli public’s portfolio of financial assets was worth a record NIS 7.4 trillion. This represents growth of NIS 1.1 trillion within a year, and an 80% rise within six years. At the beginning of 2020, the public’s portfolio was worth NIS 4.1 trillion.
The continual growth in the financial assets portfolio, which includes money held in bank accounts, savings programs (provident funds, pension funds, and mutual funds), and securities, provides a glimpse into the way in which Israelis have managed their money in recent years, the level of risk that they tend to take, and their impact on prices in the local stock market.
Appetite for risk
A glance at the make-up of the public’s financial assets shows that Israeli investors’ appetite for risk has grown considerably. At the end of 2022, the proportion of risk assets (stocks and bonds) in the portfolio was 39%. By the beginning of 2026 it had jumped to 48%.
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HBO’s John Oliver went on an especially nasty rant against Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight for his recent majority opinion in Louisiana v. Callais. Oliver declared that Alito’s claim that the South isn’t as racist as it was in the 60s is “obviously horseshit” and suggested Alito supports segregation multiple times.
Oliver teed up a clip of a report from ABC’s Rachel Scott by claiming, “That ruling basically gutted Section Two of the VRA, which prohibits race-based discrimination when it comes to voting, including drawing election maps that dilute minority voting power, and in writing the opinion for the majority, Justice Alito took a bold swing.”
John Oliver claims it “obviously horseshit” that America, and especially the South, have made strides in fighting, in Justice Sam Alito’s words, “entrenched racial discrimination.” He says Alito has “‘This school dance wasn’t supposed to be integrated’ energy” and calls him… pic.twitter.com/laUAelx2zL
— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) May 5, 2026
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Residents of different countries don’t age the same. This should be pretty obvious. Some countries are vastly more developed than others.
Trump says he has paused effort to guide vessels from the Strait of Hormuz – National– globalnews.ca
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President Donald Trump said on Tuesday evening that he is pausing the U.S. effort to guide stranded vessels out of the Strait of Hormuz to allow time for a deal to end the Iran war, but that the American forces’ blockade of Iranian ports would remain in place.
Trump announced the decision in a social media post, saying the effort — which started on Monday in the vital waterway for global energy — would pause for a short period to see whether an agreement with Tehran on ending the war in the Middle East could be finalized.
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The Associated Press has declared Amy Acton the winner of the Democratic nomination for governor. The wire has also declared Vivek Ramaswamy the winner of Ohio’s Republican primary for governor.
Meanwhile, NBC News has called Sherrod Brown the winner of Ohio’s Democratic Senate race. We’ll be awaiting the Associated Press’s official projections.
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There is a worm living in water-filled cracks in ancient rock in a South African gold mine that has no business being there. It’s smaller than a grain of rice. It has no eyes, and it exists in conditions that most animals, even some of the toughest on Earth, simply could not cope with. Meet Halicephalobus mephisto, or the devil worm, as it’s more commonly known. This little worm blew scientists’ previous understanding of life on Earth.
A discovery that no one saw comingIn 2011, scientists announced they’d found a living nematode worm 1.3 kilometres (0.8 miles) below the Earth’s surface, about as deep as four Empire State Buildings on top of each other. The discovery, announced in the study Nematoda from the terrestrial deep subsurface of South Africa, was instantly significant. Not that nematodes were especially glamorous, but because there had never been a nematode found so far underground. Bacteria and microbes, sure. However, a multicellular animal? That was meant to be impossible.
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CT Mirror celebrated a gubernatorial bill signing May 4, claiming it would require federal agents to display their names or badge numbers — facilitating the already out-of-control doxxing against ICE — persecute ICE for defending themselves with lethal force, and prevent arrests at schools and churches. It appears that Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont might have made his disgusting accusations at his bill signing, when he claimed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are “brutal,” criticized Trump for referring to criminal illegal aliens as “criminal aliens,” and compared immigration enforcement to the historical Know-Nothing party, anti-Catholic laws, and “Jim Crow laws.” “Never before…has it been led by the White House,” he pontificated, ignoring the numerous Democrat presidents who explicitly aligned themselves with the KKK and political violence.
DHS was quick to respond to Lamont’s propaganda with a list of the despicable illegal alien criminals who were living in — and quite possibly receiving taxpayer-funded benefits in — Connecticut before ICE arrested them. The aliens’ crimes include murder, pedophilic sexual assault, and child abuse.
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The California primaries are the best thing to happen to Republicans facing a perilous midterms. It’s California, one of only two states the media cares about (the other being New York). The “jungle primary” puts Rs and Ds against each other early on, with the two top vote getters moving to the general. And having Rs on stage with Ds helps expose that, while Trump might not be polling well, Americans hate what the left has been selling. This was clear as Republican Steven Hilton totally pantsed all the Democrats on stage.
Point of information: Democrats have been in total control of California for decades, so anything happening in the state is their fault. This makes it awkward for other Democrats to say that the state isn’t working for Californians. Or, while we’re at it, New Yorkers either.
The safe, consultant-driven thing for Hilton to do would be to avoid the word “Trump” at all costs. Instead, he, as a legal immigrant, says if elected, he’ll work with Trump to enforce the laws dealing with the illegal ones. Then you had when the Democrats on stage tried to blame Donald Trump for California being a su-diddly-ucky place to live.
Donald Trump is the president in ALL the other states of America, where the cost of living is WAY LOWER than in California.
It’s not Donald Trump who’s given us gas prices $2 higher than the REST of the country! It’s Democrat policies, which ALL the Democrats here support.
It’s NOT Donald Trump that’s given us the highest housing costs in the country. It’s Democrat policies that all these Democrats support!
Obviously, it is way past time for change in California and endlessly going on about Donald Trump doesn’t serve the needs of the struggling families and small businesses.