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As climate change intensifies, scientists are becoming increasingly concerned about how animals will cope with a more unpredictable world. One way to gain insight is by studying how animals have already responded to natural climate fluctuations. But for long-lived, social animals like humans and other primates, gathering this kind of evidence takes time.
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Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said she does not want to see authorities “monitoring” church services in her province in light of a new federal law that criminalizes religious expression and belief when quoting parts of the Bible.
“I don’t want to see the police monitoring Sunday services!” Smith told a crowd of nearly 1,000 Christians and pastors over the weekend while speaking at the Alberta Christian Leadership Summit.
“Faith is to be expressed openly and carried into the public square.”
A host of Alberta and Canadian Christian politicians gathered with pastors of churches to talk about faith and its importance in society. Campaign Life Coalition (CLC) was there with a booth.
Smith was invited to be the main speaker at the event, which saw hundreds gather to share the importance of Christianity in public life and politics. Her speech touched on several issues, but she did speak out against the controversial Bill C-9.
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IRAN has blasted drones and missiles at the UAE for the second day in a row as the ceasefire in the Middle East is stretched to its limits.
It comes as Donald Trump tries to force open the Strait of Hormuz with “Project Freedom”.
Iran chillingly warned it was “just getting started” after unleashing a barrage of missiles towards the UAE yesterday.
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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.