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House health panel advances bills to combat elevated blood lead levels, fetal alcohol syndrome

The Michigan House Committee on Health Policy voted on Wednesday morning to advance two packages of bills to combat childhood lead exposure and fetal alcohol syndrome. Two of the three bills on lead exposure were not reported, however, and were instead referred to the House Committee on Rules. House Bill 4864, would alter Michigan’s definition […]

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Jun 4 • 7:03 AM EDT • Health • michiganadvance.com
Would Hackney be an Everton fit?

Middlesbrough fan Tom Green has been speaking to BBC Radio Merseyside's Total Sport show about the Toffees' links with midfielder Hayden Hackney. Hackney is said to have a number of suitors but reports this week have said Everton are one of them. Supporter Green, from The Boro Breakdown podcast, says he would expect a fee of between £15-20m for 23-year-old Hackney, who is out of contract in June of 2027.

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Jun 4 • 7:03 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Investing in health will spur D-FW economy, healthcare leaders say

At a Wednesday Dallas Regional Chamber Summit, healthcare leaders discussed pathways to closing a stark gap in health outcomes across Dallas, which they say would also boost the economy.

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Jun 4 • 7:00 AM EDT • Health • dallasnews.com
Rural health network aims to strengthen independent hospitals

The North Shore Health Board received a presentation from Cibolo Rural Health Network on the benefits of the Headwaters Network, a high-value network made up of Minnesota’s rural independent health care providers. “I would say a relevant correlator to the high-value network is that of a farmers’ co-op,” Brittany Sachdeva, chief operating officer for Cibolo,...

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Jun 4 • 6:20 AM EDT • Health • wtip.org
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CT company sells one unit for $1.9B. It wants to focus on business it was founded on.

Under the terms of the deal, the company would receive $300 million at closing and additional payments over the next seven years.

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Jun 4 • 5:00 AM EDT • Business • courant.com
In a stormy session, workforce training wins were a bipartisan bright spot, business groups say

Bills that would restructure the state's workforce training programs — and redirect more federal money to the state, expand career programs beginning as early as middle school, and creating programs to connect college students to career opportunities passed with support from both sides of the aisle.

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Jun 4 • 5:00 AM EDT • Business • nola.com
Braves linked to trade idea for Giants' $90M Cy Young finalist, Gold Glover to pair with Chris Sale

The Atlanta Braves are looking to add a starter and have been since the offseason. This deal would give them someone who would make their rotation better for now and October.

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Jun 4 • 4:09 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Smack-Talking Rousey ‘Doesn’t Want’ Holm Rematch

It’s been over a decade since the high kick heard ‘round the world. In November 2015, Holly Holm picked apart and knocked out the previously undefeated Ronda Rousey, shaking up the sport in a shocking way. The two would never rematch, however, as Holm lost her title (in the worst business decision of all time?) […]

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Jun 4 • 3:00 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Dave Roberts says Dodgers have the capital to trade for Tigers ace Tarik Skubal: 'They would go ballistic'
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Jun 4 • 1:34 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
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Summerville town council to consider open container ordinance for entertainment district

Summerville town council is set to consider an ordinance that would allow people to carry and drink alcohol within parts of the town’s entertainment district.

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Jun 3 • 11:43 PM EDT • Entertainment • live5news.com
Scientists will lose critical climate record as ocean observatory goes dark under Trump funding cuts

The National Science Foundation announced it would dismantle most of the ocean monitoring system, pulling instruments from waters off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina and Greenland by 2027.

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Jun 3 • 9:26 PM EDT • Science • adn.com
Ohio Senate passes resolution to put voter photo ID amendment on Nov. ballot

The Ohio Senate has passed a resolution that would put an amendment on the November ballot, one to require voters to show photo ID at the polls.

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Jun 3 • 8:02 PM EDT • Politics • news5cleveland.com
Latest White House move to politicise science funding provokes ...

US research community mobilising to push back on proposed rule that would give apparatchiks control of which research gets funded

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Jun 3 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • chemistryworld.com
Cal Thomas: Politics and failure

Politics is the only profession of which I am aware in which competence doesn’t seem to matter. One can fail miserably; one can be corrupt and one can get away with crimes that if committed by someone outside of elective office, arrest, prosecution and a stint in jail would be the result. Yet politicians, Democrats […]

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Jun 3 • 8:00 PM EDT • Politics • mauinews.com
Quentin Tarantino rips modern movies from Hollywood's 'flavorless sausage factory,' would 'rather read a book'

Quentin Tarantino slammed contemporary movies, as he called Hollywood a 'flavorless sausage factory' — but named a few recent films he actually liked.

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Jun 3 • 7:04 PM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com
Donald Trump says Ron DeSantis would be 'very good' as Attorney General

Is America's Governor in the on-deck circle?

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Jun 3 • 5:47 PM EDT • Politics • floridapolitics.com
House passes resolution for first time to halt military action against Iran in rebuke of Trump

The House approved a war powers resolution that would halt the U.S. military action against Iran, defying the president as a handful of Republicans joined with Democrats to end the three-month-long war that has reordered politics at home and abroad.

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Jun 3 • 5:39 PM EDT • Politics • pbs.org
SpaceX sets the stage for a record $75 billion IPO

Elon Musk’s SpaceX unveiled plans Wednesday to set a $135 share price in its initial public offering price, for a sale worth $75 billion. The blockbuster debut would make Musk – already the world’s richest person – the first-ever trillionaire.

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Jun 3 • 4:44 PM EDT • Business • cnn.com
Draft defense bill would halt cuts, closures of military health facilities

House members are seeking to stop the closure or reductions of services at U.S. military hospitals and clinics.

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Jun 3 • 4:41 PM EDT • Health • militarytimes.com
Avista agrees to framework to provide single business with power equal to half of all Spokane County customers

Avista Corp. has entered into a memorandum of understanding with one "large load" customer that is seeking to use an amount of electricity that would be equal to more than half the combined power used by all residential and business customers in Spokane County.

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Jun 3 • 3:30 PM EDT • Business • spokesman.com
Cruz, Cantwell bill to overhaul college sports gets Nick Saban backing

Senators in both parties say they are close to passing landmark legislation that would pave the way for a major overhaul of the rules governing college athletics. The “Protect College Sports” Act, …

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Jun 3 • 3:18 PM EDT • Sports • thehill.com
Politics: What’s Life Like For The Government Employees Still Working?

More than 300,000 federal workers have left government service since the start of the second Trump administration.Some were laid off by the administration. Some took buyouts. Some walked out. The cuts hit every major agency — from the State Department to the Justice Department.That doesn’t mean things have been easy for those still working for the government. Last week, the Office of Personnel Management proposed requiring all federal employees to sign non-disclosure agreements that would prevent them from sharing internal government information.We sit down to talk about how those cuts are affecting the workers who remained.Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.

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Jun 3 • 2:29 PM EDT • Politics • npr.org
High-Signal Publisher
Senators urge quick action to halt college sports decay

Senators and college officials on Wednesday urged swift action on a bipartisan measure that aims to overhaul college athletics system they say hemorrhages money and hinders student-athletes — even as two powerful conferences said they would seek changes. During a much-anticipated Senate Commerce Committee hearing, both the bill’s authors — Chair Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and […]

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Jun 3 • 2:20 PM EDT • Sports • rollcall.com
Apple Says macOS 27 Won't Be Compatible With These Macs

During WWDC 2025, Apple revealed that macOS 26 Tahoe would be the final major macOS version for Intel-based Macs. macOS 27 will be compatible with Apple silicon Macs only, meaning that you will need a Mac with an M-series chip or a MacBook Neo with an A18 Pro chip in order to install the software update. Apple will unveil macOS 27 during its WWDC 2026 keynote this Monday, June 8, and the update should be widely released in September.

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Jun 3 • 11:29 AM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com
LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight reveals Nintendo Switch 2 release date, new trailer

We’ve been wondering when LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight would be heading to Nintendo Switch 2, and we now have that answer. Warner Bros. and TT Games just revealed that the game is heading to the console on September 18, 2026. LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight just had its initial launch a couple of weeks ago....

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Jun 3 • 11:03 AM EDT • Technology • nintendoeverything.com
Football Extra's Dream Signings: Tottenham Hotspur

Another central midfielder, surely this is a wind-up. You could argue the former even saved them from relegation with his crucial goals against Wolves and Everton, though it seems unlikely Palhinha's loan from Bayern Munich will be made permanent at this point. Spurs may not be that right now – though signing Stiller would show serious aspiration to return to the Premier League's upper echelon.

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Jun 3 • 10:51 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
May's top PlayStation games by copies sold

Yesterday’s State of Play gave us an idea of where PlayStation’s heading next. But we’ve had our May estimates for a couple of days now (we always update our data daily for clients), so it’s time to look at what performed best on PlayStation last month. We’ve got a new IP at the top, two evergreens doing their evergreen thing, FC26 smashing it ahead of the World Cup Plus pivot, and a quiet but promising result for Lego Batman. Let’s have a look at the state of Play…Station’s top games for May. 007 takes #001 007 First Light sold 1M copies on PS5 in May, easily making it the month’s top PS5 game by copies sold. Over 80% of those May copies were digital, which is broadly in line with where PlayStation’s digital share has settled for new releases this year. To date, 007 First Light has sold through 2.2M copies across platforms (so no unsold retail copies in that figure). The platform split is 55.1% PS5, 33.1% Steam, and 11.8% Xbox (console, Windows, and cloud combined). In gross revenue terms, 007 First Light has generated $150M. Owing to regional pricing and audience composition differences, the consoles make up a higher share of revenue than they do copies. Of the $150M, 60.5% came via PlayStation, 27.6% via Steam, and 12.9% via Xbox. Part of this is because over two-thirds of 007 First Light‘s PlayStation audience is in North America (43.4%) or Western Europe (23.2%), where local currency means the game generates more revenue per player. On Steam, under half of First Light‘s audience is from those same regions (31.8% North America, 15.1% Western Europe). As we covered in last week’s 007 Steam piece, the Steam version is pulling in higher-than-expected numbers in China, which now accounts for 17.3% of First Light‘s Steam audience. 007 is the equivalent of $44 USD in China, which is roughly 37% cheaper than the US price and about 44% cheaper than Western Europe. Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe The crossover data backs up what we’ve seen all year about launch-window cohorts. 11% of PS5 players who played 007 First Light in May also played Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, which launched just a few days before. Last month was a great month for Denmark! IO Interactive is Copenhagen-based, and Lego Group is headquartered in Billund (TT Games is UK-based but produces work under Lego Group licence and direction). Speaking of which… A very blocky #2 and #3 Minecraft sold another 788K copies on PlayStation consoles last month. Business as usual, since Minecraft hasn’t sold fewer than 760K copies in a single month all year. With over 350M copies sold across all platforms, Minecraft is the best-selling game in history and one of the strongest brands in the world. Every month, a new cohort of children reaches Minecraft age, which guarantees a constant volume of new sales regardless of what the broader market is up to. The demographic refresh rate is truly impressive, with the audience renewing itself faster than it’s churning. Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight shifted 757K copies on PS5 last month, bringing its lifetime total on the platform to over 800K. Across all platforms, Legacy of the Dark Knight has now passed 1.5M sold through, so PlayStation accounts for over half of the game’s players. The May crossover data for Legacy of the Dark Knight on PS5 is also useful. 27% of those players also played Fortnite, 16% Roblox, 16% FC 26, and 14% NBA 2K. That’s the household-and-family cohort showing up, plus the launch-window cohort of core gamers who buy practically everything. FC 26 gets players through the door ahead of the World Cup FC 26 sold 411K copies on PlayStation last month (90% via PS5), the fewest copies FC 26 has sold all year and down heavily from April’s 700K. Part of this dropoff is because FC 26 has been available as a PlayStation Plus monthly game since 6 May, cannibalising premium sales. Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe The strategic logic is straightforward for EA, which is sacrificing premium unit sales in May to build up the player base ahead of the FIFA World Cup, which kicks off on 11 June. Obviously, a bigger player pool going into the tournament means a bigger pool of potential Ultimate Team spenders during the period when football attention is at its peak. The early returns are around what you’d expect, with 4.4M new players accessing FC 26 via PS Plus last month – a substantial new spender pool. Anecdotally, a few of my mates who were ‘’skipping FIFA and Ultimate Team this year’’, were drawn back in via PS Plus. Lo and behold, one of them is buying packs like it’s going out of fashion. Whether this is all a smart trade for EA depends entirely on the Ultimate Team conversion rate over the next six weeks. Either way, the short-term engagement impact on the game as a whole is evident. FC 26‘s MAUs hit a record 24M on PlayStation in May, up 30% from the previous record set in April. GTA V does what GTA V always does Rounding out the top five is another evergreen title. Grand Theft Auto V shifted another 387K copies on PlayStation last month. No matter what else is happening in the industry, GTA V keeps pulling players in. It’s sold another 1.8M copies on PS5 in the first half of this year alone, helping the franchise pass the 230M-sold milestone across all platforms. Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe I have a theory that Minecraft and GTA V are doing the same thing at different demographic levels. Both are functioning as generational gateway games that the audience ages into faster than it ages out of. Minecraft captures kids around age 6-10, GTA V captures much of the same audience around age 12-15 (unofficially, of course). The crossover data suggests this: 40% of GTA V‘s monthly PlayStation players typically play Fortnite in any given month, while 30% play Roblox. Household accounts aside, that’s not the original GTA V audience from 2013. Of course, the under-12 audience would love to get their hands on GTA, too. It’s always been the way of things, and some parents are happy to oblige. Mine did too back in the day, and I turned out just fine. Right? Right!? Want to get your hands on our data for yourself – for free? We’re offering a free trial of our platform for games companies. Send us a message here, or reply to this email, and we’ll set you up. The last word Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover. [Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

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Jun 3 • 10:49 AM EDT • Technology • alineaanalytics.substack.com
Missing Congressman Tom Kean, Jr. Wins Primary

Kean, who hasn’t been seen in months, said he would be “completely transparent” about the medical condition that has sidelined him.

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Jun 3 • 10:32 AM EDT • Politics • nymag.com
The Trump Administration Has Launched Its Biggest Threat Yet to Scientific Research. We Can Stop Them.

Last week, the White House released draft regulations that—if enacted—will upend US science as we know it. Under the rule proposed by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), political appointees would have the final say over who gets billions of dollars of federal funding for res

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Jun 3 • 10:15 AM EDT • Science • blog.ucs.org
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Elections to top science bodies test Croatia’s gender equality in research

Croatia’s track-record on gender equality in science has been both questioned and lauded in recent months, following both bad and good news on the topic. On the one hand, a senior awards committee was announced without a single woman researcher included. On the other, the national science academy welcomed its first cohort of fellows with more women than men.Members of the committee, which gives national awards recognising scientific achievement, are proposed by the ministry of science and endorsed by the parliament. The current line-up does include a woman, but she is culture minister Nina Obuljen Koržinek rather than a researcher. Even then, she didn’t make it into the photograph released to announce the appointments on April 16. “The image speaks a thousand words,” says Tanja Rudež, a science journalist for Jutarnji List newspaper. “I am surprised that none of these men, all well-known scientists, saw a problem with the fact that there was not a single successful female scientist on the committee,” she told Science|Business.Ivan Đikić, a prominent Croatian biochemist based at Goethe University Medical School, commented on LinkedIn that the news illustrated a “sad truth” about the state of science in Croatia.“It [. . .] reveals a system where women, despite contributing a substantial share of high-quality, internationally competitive science, are systematically excluded from the very processes that determine recognition and influence,” he wrote. Some 60% of researchers in Croatia are women, according to the Croatian Bureau of Statistics, and they perform well in international competitions. For example, of the 12 European Research Council (ERC) grants awarded to Croatian researchers, seven went to women.“So how is it possible that decision-making bodies are still dominated by men over 60, while not a single female ERC laureate is involved in the selection process?” asked Đikić. “This is not a marginal oversight; it is a structural failure.” The ministry of science did not reply to a request for comment. The awards committee is not unusual. For example, a scientific advisory body announced by the ministry of demographics in April comprises 35 men and five women. The board of the Croatian Science Foundation, newly appointed by the parliament, is a little better, with five men and two women, but still unequal. “This is especially significant because such bodies do not merely distribute prestige. They shape research priorities, funding allocation and long-term scientific development,” Marija Lugarić, chair of the parliament’s committee on gender equality, told Science|Business. “Representation here matters not only symbolically, but materially.”Referring to the awards committee and the board of the science foundation, Lugarić says that while both bodies were appointed by parliament, neither met the minimum 40% gender balance threshold that Croatian law and EU guidelines expressly recommend for public bodies.Đikić wants to see EU institutions put pressure on the government to ensure basic standards of fairness, transparency and democratic governance in science policy are met. “Meaningful change will not come without pressure,” he wrote. “It must intensify both within Croatia and at the level of European institutions. Anything less undermines the credibility of Europe’s commitment to excellence and inclusion in science.”Rudež also underlined the importance of talking and writing about this topic, “because public opinion in Croatia does influence changes in the status and visibility of women in science.”The European Commission has not yet responded to a request for comment.Good news from the academyA more positive story came from the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts on 21 May, with the announcement of seven new women fellows and five men. This is the first time in the academy’s 165-year history that women have outnumbered men in a new intake.One of the new fellows, two-time ERC grantee Iva Tolić, credits the academy leadership with trying to be more modern and inclusive, representing the whole community better. “The academy is really aware that so far, before this election, there were very few women,” she told Science|Business. “So, they are actively trying to make this more equal.”Related articlesExplained: How the MSCA is close to achieving gender balanceCall for EU to leverage academic freedom in global talent raceRudež is more cautious, noting that despite the academy’s “breakthrough this year [. . .] it is still a predominantly male institution, with only 18% women.”This reflects a wider imbalance in Croatia’s research landscape. “The key levers of power in science are still in the hands of men,” she went on. “For example, all 14 rectors of private and public universities are men.”Similarly, Lugarić says a structural glass ceiling still exists in Croatian science, which is “most visible precisely where power is exercised.”She cites data from the Commission’s She Figures 2024 report, which shows that Croatia ranks second in the EU for gender equality in research and innovation overall, with an equality index of 79.6 out of 100. It is in the top five for women’s career advancement, participation in research; representation across all research sectors and for scientific publications.In stark contrast, it ranks second to last when it comes to women in decision-making positions in science. “This is not a coincidence,” Lugarić says. “It is a structural pattern.”Informal barriersThe persistent under-representation of women in the highest structures of Croatia’s academies, boards, award committees and leadership positions is not down to formal barriers, Lugarić says, but arises from more subtle obstacles such as “informal networks, persistent expectations regarding traditional gender roles and the unequal distribution of care responsibilities.”Tolić would like to see more support for young women in terms of affordable housing and child support, and higher salaries. Currently, she says, salaries in science stay low for the first 10-15 years, while housing and spaces in kindergarten are limited and expensive. “You have to work a lot, you get very little money, so it’s not great to have a family in this situation,” she says.But despite the challenges, Tolić is optimistic, saying that gender equality in research in Croatia is “definitely improving and going in the right direction.” The situation is particularly promising in biology, she adds, where most full professors, heads of department and deans of faculties are women. Lugarić, too, see the glass ceiling “very slowly, cracking,” and cites the academy election as an example that structural change is possible. Yet the situation in the national awards committee is a “stark reminder that without a conscious, systemic commitment to gender balance, progress will remain slow and uneven.”

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Jun 3 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencebusiness.net
The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science

With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!

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Jun 3 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • iai.tv
Trump Says Vance and Rubio Teaming up for 2028 Run Would Be Unbeatable

June 3 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald ⁠Trump ⁠said in a podcast ⁠interview aired on Wednesday that Vice President JD Vance and U.S. Secretary of State Rubio, teaming up ‌for a 2028 presidential run, ‌would be unbeatable. Both men are seen as contenders ⁠for ⁠the 2028 Republican nomination, and ...

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Jun 3 • 7:18 AM EDT • Politics • usnews.com
President Trump seeks control of science funding

The White House Office of Management and Budget is moving to take more control of billions of dollars in federal grants. Critics say the proposed change would jeopardize the integrity of U.S. science.

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Jun 3 • 7:00 AM EDT • Science • vpm.org
President Trump seeks control of science funding

The White House Office of Management and Budget is moving to take more control of billions of dollars in federal grants. Critics say the proposed change would jeopardize the integrity of U.S. science.

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Jun 3 • 7:00 AM EDT • Science • npr.org
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President Trump seeks control of science funding

The White House Office of Management and Budget is moving to take more control of billions of dollars in federal grants. Critics say the proposed change would jeopardize the integrity of U.S. science.

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Jun 3 • 7:00 AM EDT • Politics • npr.org
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NBA Finals: Would you pay $4,000 – for a nosebleed seat?

Tickets to the NBA Finals in New York are so hot that fans are spending thousands of dollars – even for nosebleed seats.

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Jun 3 • 6:30 AM EDT • Business • cnn.com
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GOP lawmakers push to make Israel pay for U.S. weapons

In a reflection of the turbulent politics of Israel, two Republicans are pushing a resolution that would require Israel to pay for any weapons it gets from the United States. The Republicans are staunchly pro-Israel and Netanyahu’s government supports the move as an effort to head off growing anti-Israel sentiment in the United States.

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Jun 3 • 6:00 AM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com
Another year, another Va. retail cannabis market veto leaves businesses, the public with few options

By Yiqing Wang and Toby Cox/WHRO Throughout her bid for governor, Gov. Abigail Spanberger said she would support a bill to set up a legal, adult-use cannabis market — which is why her veto on May 19 c...

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Jun 3 • 5:26 AM EDT • Business • yahoo.com
COMMENTARY: Politics and failure

Politics is the only profession of which I am aware in which competence doesn't seem to matter. One can fail miserably; one can be corrupt and one can get away with crimes that if committed by someone outside of elective office, arrest, prosecution and a stint in jail would be the result. Yet politicians, Democrats and Republicans, continue to get re-elected.

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Jun 3 • 5:00 AM EDT • Politics • newstribune.com
President Trump seeks control of science funding

The White House and the Office of Management and Budget is moving to take more control of billions of dollars federal grants. This move has implications for areas as broad as housing and transportation, but science and health would be the most significantly impacted. Scientists and advocates say if it goes into effect, the change would jeopardize the integrity of science in the United States.

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Jun 3 • 4:39 AM EDT • Science • southcarolinapublicradio.org
Los Angeles Rams have the makings of a dynasty

When the Los Angeles Rams took a step back after their Super Bowl victory, many around the NFL believed they would struggle to return to contention. Some executives, including Buffalo Bills general manager Brandon Beane, even pointed to the Rams…

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Jun 2 • 5:48 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Liverpool turned down Ibrahima Konaté’s contract renewal agreement

Liverpool FC walked away from contract renewal talks with Ibrahima Konaté (27) in turning down an agreement, according to L’Equipe. The Reds confirmed on Sunday that the France international would...

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Jun 2 • 2:10 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
NWA Citizen Science Call 2026 (Astrobiology, Origin of life, Biosignatures)

Dear all, We would like to draw your attention to the NWA Citizen Science Call 2026.

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Jun 2 • 11:02 AM EDT • Science • astrobiology.com
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How Science Works

The 2nd Weather and Climate Livestream is now underway. It is organized by a group of early-career researchers concerned about declining funding for the field and eager to demonstrate how weather and climate research makes a difference in our lives. Last year’s event was a great success, drawing terrific press coverage including a piece in the NY Times. This year features a strong lineup of talks aimed at a general audience — I highly recommend tuning in. Share I gave a talk yesterday about How Science Works in Three Steps. You can see the short presentation here (I’ve appended a transcript below): And please tune into the livestream here. It runs through tomorrow at 6 pm ET. Thanks for reading The Climate Brink! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. Subscribe Cleaned up transcript: Thank you, and thanks to everyone tuning in. I want to talk about something I think a lot of people don’t really understand: how science actually works. Arguments over any scientific topic — climate change, vaccines, you name it — revolve around competing claims. For climate change, the claims are: Is the Earth warming? Are humans to blame? What will the impacts be? Over the last 150 years, the scientific community has developed a remarkably robust method for sorting out which claims are true and which aren’t. That method is what I want to walk through. So how does science generate knowledge? If you ask a high schooler, they’ll give you the version they learned in ninth grade: an individual scientist forms a hypothesis, runs an experiment, and draws a conclusion. That’s more or less what happens at the individual level, though in practice it’s more iterative — you design, test, and refine all at once, landing on a slightly different idea each time until you reach a conclusion about whatever hypothesis you’ve ended up with. But this isn’t science. It’s only step one. Any individual scientist can make mistakes — scientists are human. Maybe there’s a bug in the code, maybe there’s an error in the experiment. Just because someone ran an experiment and reached a conclusion doesn’t mean it’s right, and scientists don’t treat a single result as settled truth. Step two is peer review, the first layer of quality control. The scientist writes up what they did and submits it to a journal, which sends the paper to other experts in the field. Those experts judge whether the methods are sound, whether it properly references prior work, and whether the conclusions actually follow from the data. Ask any scientist and they’ll tell you peer review is miserable — the comments come back brutal, often harsh, and you have to revise and resubmit, sometimes multiple times, before an editor finally accepts the paper. Peer review catches an immense amount of bad science, but it can’t catch all of it. Reviewers get sloppy or overworked, they miss obvious mistakes, and they can’t catch hidden errors — a bug in the code, a misread instrument. So a peer-reviewed paper making it into a journal doesn’t mean the paper is right. Nobody treats a single paper as the final word. That’s where step three comes in: the crucible of science. Important results get retested by the broader community. If you publish something interesting, it gets dissected. Sometimes people try to reproduce your work directly but more often they test its implications. If someone claims X is true, and that implies that Y is also true, then scientists will go check Y. If a claim survives this gauntlet long enough, it becomes accepted. That’s how we generate knowledge. Let me give an example: the ozone hole. In 1985 — and I doubt many people watching were around then, but I remember it well — Joe Farman and his colleagues published observations from Antarctica showing that a huge chunk of ozone was disappearing every year. This was shocking because most atmospheric chemists had expected ozone loss to occur at mid-latitudes and high altitudes, not over the South Pole. When scientists see something they don’t understand, they rush to explain it, and several competing hypotheses quickly appeared in the peer-reviewed literature. One pointed to chlorine chemistry from chlorofluorocarbons. A second blamed nitrogen chemistry, possibly driven by solar proton events — meaning the sun was responsible. A third argued it wasn’t chemistry at all but dynamics: winds were carrying naturally low-ozone air from the lower atmosphere up into the stratosphere. Then the community went to work testing which theory could survive the crucible. Aircraft flew into the ozone hole and found no nitrogen, ruling out the nitrogen theory. Measurements showed the air in the polar vortex was descending, not rising — which would bring high-ozone air down, eliminating the dynamics theory. Meanwhile, those same flights measured enormous amounts of chlorine, strongly correlated with exactly the regions where ozone was being destroyed. That became known as the “smoking gun” paper, and it established that chlorine chemistry was the cause. Through this process, a consensus emerged. And it’s worth being clear that this consensus is organic. There’s no vote, no poll, no meeting where it gets decided. Scientists go to conferences, talk to one another, and independently arrived at the same answer. It’s the ultimate free market of ideas. After the consensus was established, the peer-reviewed literature doesn’t even mention the rival theories — it simply takes chlorine chemistry as given. That’s what a consensus looks like. It doesn’t mean every single scientist agrees, but it does mean there’s no longer any legitimate debate. So where can you see what scientists actually think? It’s all in the peer-reviewed literature, which contains the entire historical record of the argument: the discovery, the competing theories, the debate, the testing, and finally the community coalescing around one answer. But there’s a lot of room for misrepresentation. You can dig up an old paper claiming the ozone hole was caused by dynamics and wave it around as if there still was a debate about the cause of the ozone hole — without mentioning that the idea was disproven long ago and that even its own authors no longer believe it. There’s a bigger problem, though: the peer-reviewed literature is written in a language I call “nerd.” It’s extremely hard to read — honestly, some of it is hard for me to follow. It takes graduate students years to work through the literature in a single field, so we can’t expect policymakers or ordinary people to do it. This is where scientific assessments come in. The most famous is the IPCC — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The job of an assessment is to read and summarize the peer-reviewed literature, synthesizing what’s settled, what’s been disproven, and what remains genuinely debated. To ensure the assessments accurately summarize the peer-reviewed literature, assessments are written by large teams, which are far less prone to bias than individuals and which dilute the influence of any one scientist with an axe to grind. The teams are deliberately assembled to avoid stacking the deck, and the reports themselves go through multiple rounds of peer review. That rigorous process is exactly why you can trust them and why people consider the IPCC to be the gold standard of what we know about the climate system. An assessment produced through a different process may well not be credible. You can even watch the consensus evolve across assessments. Take the attribution of warming. The 1990 IPCC report said the observed warming was broadly consistent with model predictions but also comparable to natural variability — in other words, we don’t know whether humans are responsible. By 1995, it concluded that the balance of evidence suggested a discernible human influence — a sentence only a committee could write, and one that barely commits to anything. By 2001, most of the warming over the previous 50 years was judged “likely” due to greenhouse gases; by 2007, “very likely”; by 2013, “extremely likely.” The 2023 report says essentially the same as 2013 — there’s not much stronger language available. So, to wrap up: science is our ultimate tool for deciphering the universe — the most successful method we’ve ever developed for determining what’s true and what isn’t. Our understanding is written into the peer-reviewed literature, so if you want to know what scientists think, that’s where to look. And for those of us who don’t speak nerd, scientific assessments are the Rosetta Stone — they translate nerd into English. Let me open the floor to questions. Thank you.

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Jun 2 • 10:35 AM EDT • Science • theclimatebrink.com
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Melinda French Gates Just Made a Massive, Unexpected Move Into Professional Sports

Yesterday, the philanthropist announced that she would join a popular organization as a minority investor.

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Jun 2 • 10:35 AM EDT • Sports • inc.com
White House Seeks to Impose Political Test on Billions in Federal Grants

A new proposal would allow the administration to block grants if they do not satisfy President Trump’s agenda or support what it calls “anti-American” values.

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Jun 2 • 10:34 AM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com
The work you can't always see: Beer is political, part 2

Recently I published a piece about beer, politics, and the question of who speaks up and who doesn’t. I meant every word of it. I still do. And then my inbox opened up. Cleveland Prost is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe I’ve been writing about beer since 2014. For most of that time, I kept things deliberately light — taproom profiles, new releases, the people behind the pints. Gradually, over years of building this thing, you gave me something I didn’t expect: permission. Permission to go deeper. To say what I actually saw in this industry and what I actually believed about it. That trust isn’t something I take lightly. It’s why that piece existed at all, and it’s why this one does too. I’m not walking anything back. But I want to go further. In that piece, I wrote that beer has never existed outside the system. That immigration policy affects who staffs breweries and harvests ingredients. That labor policy affects taproom workers. That civil rights policy affects who feels safe walking into a taproom. That “beer does not exist in a vacuum. The idea that it does is comforting. It is also false.” I believe that as much now as I did when I wrote it. But one idea came back at me, in different forms, over and over (from reader emails, comments, and conversations): that beer itself isn’t political — that it only becomes political when someone decides to make it that way. That what we’re really seeing is a choice by individuals to inject division into something that doesn’t inherently require it. It’s a comforting idea. It’s also wrong — and I think it’s worth being precise about why. That framing assumes that breweries operate outside the conditions shaping everything else. That politics is something you choose to bring into a room that was, until then, clean and neutral. That if you stay quiet, you stay clear of it. But the room was never neutral. It was never clean. Politics is already in the room. It’s in who walks through the door comfortably and who hesitates. It’s in whether a space can be used for organizing without fear. It’s in whether helping someone quietly might carry consequences you have to think carefully about in advance. It’s in who staffed the brewery, who harvested the grain, who can afford to be a regular. The idea that you opt out of all that by staying quiet is an illusion. You only change how visible your response to it is. This is, I realize, a hard thing to hear if you came to a beer newsletter for something lighter. I wrote recently that “beer, for me, has always felt like a refuge — a third place in an increasingly fractured world.” I meant that. I still do. But a refuge is not an escape from reality. It’s a place to gather strength to face it. Here’s what I actually missed — and what I want to correct. Multiple people in the industry reached out to me. I’m not naming them and I’m not identifying their businesses, because that’s not my call. If and when they want to be loud about what they’re doing, that agency belongs to them. What I can share is the substance of what they said, because it complicated something I presented too cleanly. The overall message: *You don’t know what we all are doing.* And they’re right. I don’t. One example involved a collaboration brewed quietly to support another business facing serious challenges in a whole different region, with proceeds directed toward solidarity, community, and keeping operations afloat. No announcement. It could have been broadcast widely. The point was never publicity. Another example involved logistical support for community efforts: organizing safe transportation, providing space for meetings on otherwise closed days, facilitating gatherings under difficult conditions. All of it happening while balancing real financial pressure and genuine concern for personal safety. None of what they described is a brewer “deciding to make beer political.” It’s people responding to the conditions around them — conditions that are already shaping who feels safe, who has access, who can gather, who needs help, and who has the capacity to offer it. Politics, again, already in the room. Already shaping choices. Whether anyone announced it or not. I’ve spent decades in taprooms, at barrel releases, at festivals, in back offices and brewing floors, talking to the people who built this industry from nothing. I know how much happens that never makes it onto social media. I know the owner who quietly comp’d a tab for someone having a crisis. The brewer who drove an hour to pick up a stranger who needed a safe ride. The taproom that stayed dark on a Tuesday so a community group could use the space without it becoming A Whole Thing. None of that gets a post. Most of it never will. So when I wrote recently about silence — when I said that “silence right now doesn’t feel neutral, it feels like complicity” — I was writing about what I could see. And I was right about what I saw. The public silence of breweries that have the platform, the stability, and frankly the safety to say something and choose not to? That still troubles me. I’m not softening that. But some of what I read as silence is actually something else entirely. It’s people doing the work with their hands instead of their phones. It’s people who are genuinely afraid — not of being canceled, but of real consequences for their families, their employees, their ability to keep the doors open at all. That deserves more than a footnote. It deserves to be named clearly. Here’s the tension I want to sit with honestly: public statements matter. They matter because people can’t rally around something they can’t see. Visibility creates awareness and solidarity. It helps people find each other. It tells someone standing outside your taproom door, uncertain whether they’ll be welcomed inside, something they need to know — or whether it’s even safe for them to be in public at all. That’s not performative. I wrote recently that the craft beer movement “was built on collective defiance. It was built on rejecting consolidation. On pushing back against homogeneity.” I believe that too. And I’ll extend it: breweries should be at least as loud about their values as they are when they drop a new seasonal. Your hazy IPA gets a full rollout — the label art, the tap handle photo, the countdown post. Human dignity deserves the same energy. Be as loud about human rights as you are about your beer. There is no reason those two things should require different levels of courage from you. But visibility isn’t the only form of courage. And not everyone can be visible right now without real consequences — financial, personal, sometimes physical. There are people in this industry doing hard, unglamorous, sometimes risky work in the background, and announcing it would compromise it or paint a target on someone who’s already stretched thin. That’s not silence as complicity. That’s operational discipline under pressure. What I want to push back on — clearly, not gently — is the idea that behind-the-scenes action and public visibility are in competition with each other. The person organizing quietly in the back room and the person posting a statement of solidarity on a Tuesday morning are both doing something real. We need both. We need the quiet infrastructure and we need the visible signal. We need people to know that this industry — at its best, at its most independent, and human — gives a fuck. I closed that piece with a question: “Reactive and fearful? Or clear and values-driven?” That question still stands. But having heard from you, I’d add a corollary: the values-driven path isn’t always the loudest one. Sometimes it’s a phone call and a recipe. Sometimes it’s a room made available on a closed Tuesday. Sometimes it’s a drive across town for someone who needed a safe ride home. All of it is political. All of it was always political. You don’t get to opt out of that — you only get to decide what you do with it. I’ve spent more than a decade writing about this industry because I believe it can be exactly that. I’ve been lucky enough to build an audience that lets me say so plainly. That’s a privilege I intend to use. The work is happening. Some of it you’ll see. Some of it you won’t. Support it either way. Cleveland Prost is a reader-supported publication covering beer and brewing across New York state. To receive new posts and support this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Cleveland Prost is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe

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Jun 2 • 10:13 AM EDT • Politics • clevelandprost.substack.com
Leaker: Foldable 'iPhone Ultra' Will Feature Liquid Metal Hinge

Apple's first foldable iPhone will feature an innovative liquid metal hinge and has now shipped prototype units to carriers around the world for testing, the leaker known as "Fixed Focus Digital" today said. In a new post on Weibo, Fixed Focus Digital said development and production related to the foldable are now "progressing rapidly". The claim arrives one day after the leaker reported that the foldable iPhone would feature vapor chamber cooling.

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Jun 2 • 8:46 AM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com
Bologna announce Tedesco as new coach, replacing Italiano

Serie A side Bologna announced on Tuesday Domenico Tedesco would take over as coach to replace Vincenzo Italiano, who left last week."Bologna announces that it has appointed Domenico Tedesco as first team technical director," the club said in a statement, adding the coach had signed a two-year contract with an option for a further year.

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Jun 2 • 8:11 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
iPhone 18 Pro battery capacity could offer far more modest gains this year

It’s long been rumored that the iPhone 18 Pro Max battery capacity would be the largest ever seen in an...

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Jun 2 • 7:18 AM EDT • Technology • 9to5mac.com
O'Neill over Keane a 'no-brainer' for Celtic?

Amid speculation it is now a straight fight between Robbie Keane and Martin O'Neill for the Celtic manager's job, we asked who you would like to see appointed. Henry: Stick with Martin O'Neill, if he feels he can continue. Edward: Celtic need to embrace O'Neill for one more season.

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Jun 2 • 6:36 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Sporticast: Why is Serena Williams Coming Back to Pro Tennis?

On the 557th Sporticast episode, hosts Scott Soshnick and Eben Novy-Williams discuss some of the biggest sports business stories of the week, including Serena Williams’ return to professional tennis. The 23-time Grand Slam singles champion announced Monday that she would play in a doubles event next week with young Canadian Victoria Mboko, her first official …

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Jun 2 • 5:55 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Atlantic City casino merger is in the works, but it may not be allowed

If the deal goes through, Fertitta Entertainment would take over Caesars casinos and own nearly half of all Atlantic City casinos.

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Jun 2 • 5:12 AM EDT • Entertainment • courierpostonline.com
Atlantic City casino merger is in the works, but it may not be allowed

If the deal goes through, Fertitta Entertainment would take over Caesars casinos and own nearly half of all Atlantic City casinos.

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Jun 2 • 5:12 AM EDT • Entertainment • thedailyjournal.com
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Enrique Riquelme confirms Raúl González as his sporting director

Real Madrid legend Raúl González will be the club’s sporting director if Enrique Riquelme wins the upcoming elections, said the candidate during an interview with Cadena SER. He is the right individual to lead a sports project such as the one approaching at Real Madrid. That would be Mr. Raúl González Blanco. If I become […]

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Jun 2 • 2:21 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Trump’s payout fund on shaky ground as Republicans push for retreat

The Justice Department said it would obey a court order pausing the nearly $1.8 billion fund, potentially signaling a broader pullback.

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Jun 1 • 5:10 PM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com
Treasury preps Trump $250 bill while Tubman $20 bill takes more than a decade

Legislation would allow Trump’s portrait on a $250 bill, amending a law that bans living people from appearing on currency

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Jun 1 • 4:50 PM EDT • Politics • spectrumlocalnews.com
Barcelona ‘considering’ re-signing former attacker

La Liga giants Barcelona are mulling over the possibility of bringing Jan Virgili back to the club this summer.This would come with a view to selling the winger on for a profit over the weeks to follo...

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Jun 1 • 4:40 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Missed Opportunities: Using Medicaid Section 1115 Projects to Improve the Health of Medicaid and Medicare Beneficiaries

Medicaid Section 1115 demonstration projects are widely used to test innovative policies but are subject to “budget neutrality” limits so that federal expenditures do not exceed what the federal government would have spent if the project was not adopted.

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Jun 1 • 3:31 PM EDT • Health • milbank.org
Banner employee facing sexual assault, kidnapping charges

The victim reported she felt if she yelled for help, she would be sedated or restrained.

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Jun 1 • 2:10 PM EDT • Health • kold.com
The Next Step in Trump’s War on Science - Center for Progressive Reform

A proposed new rule would replace merit-based funding of science with a heavily politicized process. It would also deprive scientists of the ability to rely on finding for long-term projects. This proposal has no real legal basis. It is likely to undermine American science, giving a boost to China's efforts to take over global scientific leadership.

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Jun 1 • 1:40 PM EDT • Science • progressivereform.org
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Yankees Birthday of the Day: Bud Metheny

The last Yankee to wear No. 3 would have turned 111 today.

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Jun 1 • 11:30 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Ken Welch says Charlie Crist’s property tax pitch would leave St. Pete with ‘impossible choices’

'Deeper property tax cuts would leave local governments with impossible choices that ultimately hurt families and communities.'

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Jun 1 • 11:27 AM EDT • Politics • floridapolitics.com
Paul Renner says he wouldn't have done anything differently than Ron DeSantis as Governor

'You'll like me, if you like Governor DeSantis.'

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Jun 1 • 9:26 AM EDT • Politics • floridapolitics.com
The Arsenal evolution, not revolution

The culmination of Mikel Arteta's 'process', which has now been well and truly 'trusted', may have reached a climax with the Premier League trophy and subsequent parade this weekend just gone. It is healthy, but Arteta needs to know who the key pillars are in his team. Two years ago, I would have said Martin Odegaard but I'm not so sure now.

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Jun 1 • 9:04 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Unfettered FedEx Freight Debuts as Stand-Alone Business

CEO John Smith said the potential of Memphis, Tenn.-based FedEx Freight would only now be truly unleashed.

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Jun 1 • 8:56 AM EDT • Business • ttnews.com
Former St. Pete Science Center to become AI and startup campus

Plans for a $25 million redevelopment would transform the former St. Pete Science Center into an AI and startup campus.

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Jun 1 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • tbbwmag.com
Paramount's Delrahim slams 'fear-mongering' and partisan politics clouding Warner Bros. deal

President Trump once said he would be involved in the Warner Bros. sale but Paramount lawyer Makan Delrahim said the company has "no deals" with the president

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Jun 1 • 6:00 AM EDT • Politics • latimes.com
Society of Interventional Radiology announces support for bill that would cut $700M in Medicare costs

SIR on May 28 announced it supports the Radiology Outpatient Ordering Transmission, or ROOT, Act, joining the American College of Radiology

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Jun 1 • 2:11 AM EDT • Business • radiologybusiness.com
DHS wants to block airlines from sanctuary cities. Experts say it would be chaos.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has a plan to punish cities that don’t enforce federal immigration policies

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Jun 1 • 2:00 AM EDT • Politics • theweek.com
AI Is Forcing Big Law to Rethink Business As Usual

In 2021, Volkswagen AG approached the global law firm Freshfields with a problem. The German carmaker’s technology unit was preparing to release new software features and wanted to make sure that they would be compliant in the more than 100 countries where Volkswagens are sold. Ordinarily, Freshfields said, it would bring in lawyers from each jurisdiction to vet the updates, budgeting thousands of euros per country — a process that would need to be repeated if any components changed in the futur

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Jun 1 • 1:56 AM EDT • Business • bloomberg.com
Sergei Pavlovich calls for title shot after UFC Macau win

Third-ranked heavyweight contender Sergei Pavlovich went into his UFC Macau main card bout against up-and-comer Tallison Teixeira without a lot to gain. Teixeira was ranked No. 15 in the division. A win for Pavlovich wouldn't have moved the needle unless the win was quick and brutal. He delivered, ...

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Jun 1 • 12:27 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
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Would the Thunder Trade Jalen Williams? 3 Teams to Watch

Jalen Williams is an important player to the OKC Thunder, but could his new contract force the former champs to move him?

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May 31 • 6:32 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Reaction to Curt Cignetti on the cover of the EA Sports College Football video game cover

Not long ago, it would have been difficult to imagine that Indiana would be represented on a national college football video game.

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May 31 • 12:33 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
California Democratic Party chair won't say if he's glad Becerra stayed in the governor's race

After spending months encouraging lower-polling candidates in the California governor's race to drop out, the leader of the state's Democratic Party would not say if he's glad an initially lower-polling Democrat now leading the polls, Xavier Becerra, stayed in the race.

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May 31 • 11:25 AM EDT • Politics • kcra.com
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Yankees' J.C. Escarra working to make an unprecedented career change

This would be impressive and drastic.

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May 31 • 9:14 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
What would proof of alien life look like? Here's what scientists are really looking for | BBC Sky at Night Magazine

The scientific community tends to employ ‘confidence of life’ detection scales: a multi-step ‘ladder’ that begins with biosignatures.

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May 31 • 6:26 AM EDT • Science • skyatnightmagazine.com
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The rise of Janeese Lewis George, who could be D.C.’s first democratic socialist mayor

Focusing on workers’ and tenants’ rights, the council member would represent a drastic shift in the status quo if elected to the city’s highest office.

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May 31 • 6:00 AM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com
Pulling Customs From ‘Sanctuary’ City Airports Would Cause Chaos, Business Groups Say

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s proposal could block hubs like Boston, New York and Los Angeles from accepting international flights.

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May 31 • 5:02 AM EDT • Business • nytimes.com
Rahe continues to come through for KU in regional play

Even before Kansas kicked off the first-ever Lawrence Regional, pitcher Boede Rahe promised that KU was going to play the exact same way it had all season — which would in turn mean that Rahe himself would bring the same level of fire to his closer role. Through two days of the regional, Rahe’s emotions […]

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May 30 • 8:00 PM EDT • Sports • www2.ljworld.com
Big 12 coaches unanimously back 24-team College Football Playoff, would consider adding 10th conference game

The league believes playoff expansion would help create more access for its members

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May 30 • 11:50 AM EDT • Sports • cbssports.com
NCAA: Sorsby's college career should end for gambling on own team

The NCAA says it would become the first major American sports league to allow an athlete who bet on their own games to continue to compete if a district court were to grant Texas Tech's Brendan Sorsby an injunction allowing him to play this season.

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May 30 • 11:27 AM EDT • Sports • espn.com
Liverpool believe the team must evolve again

It was just over two weeks ago when Arne Slot told reporters at Liverpool's AXA Training Centre that he had "every reason to believe" he would be the Reds manager next season. Slot was a major part of planning for next season and, at various times over the past few months, spoke about the importance of the summer ahead for Liverpool as they continue their transition, following a record spend of £415m in the same period last season. As recently as Friday, Slot's representatives believed there was no change in the support shown by Liverpool over the course of what the 47-year-old described to BBC Sport in February as the "toughest season" he has had.

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May 30 • 10:26 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
OpenAI’s Revenue Chief Barnstorms for Business Customers

Before former Slack CEO Denise Dresser joined OpenAI in December as its chief revenue officer, the company’s efforts to sell its products to business customers were sometimes clunky. Earlier in 2025, for example, the company had struck an agreement with Databricks, which would sell OpenAI ...

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May 30 • 9:00 AM EDT • Business • theinformation.com
Rico Dowdle’s Mom Predicted Steelers Would Sign Him

Pittsburgh Steelers running back Rico Dowdle's mom knew he would sign with the team after the Mike McCarthy hire.

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May 29 • 9:36 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
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North Kansas City Health and BCBS reach a deal. What that means for patients

Patients were informed their insurance would no longer be accepted at the Northland healthcare system.

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May 29 • 7:24 PM EDT • Health • kansascity.com
The Office of Management and Budget tries again to cripple US science

Peer review now optional, political staff would screen grants for forbidden topics.

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May 29 • 6:58 PM EDT • Science • arstechnica.com
Caesars Entertainment to be acquired by Fertitta in $17B deal

Caesars Entertainment has reached a deal with Fertitta Entertainment to be acquired. Fertitta is Texas billionaire Tilman Fertitta’s company. It owns Saltgrass Steakhouse, Golden Nugget Casinos, and the Houston Rockets. The deal could have local implications for the Mississippi Gulf Coast where Caesars operates the Harrah’s Gulf Coast Casino in Biloxi. Under the agreement, Caesars shareholders would receive 31 dollars...

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May 29 • 6:00 PM EDT • Entertainment • wxxv25.com
State Democrats’ bill would help small-business owners pay for employees’ healthcare

'At this moment, we’re in the thick of a massive affordability crisis,' said Rep. Jen Mazzocco.

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May 29 • 4:30 PM EDT • Business • pennsylvaniaindependent.com
Bailey wants to keep the Bears. How? Well, that’s not clear.

As Illinois lawmakers struggle to craft a plan that would help keep the Chicago Bears from moving to Indiana, Republican gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey says the state should find a way to keep the team — but insists individual taxpayers should also get a break.

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May 29 • 4:24 PM EDT • Politics • chicagobusiness.com
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AC's New Cobra Is A Supercharged Supercar Carroll Would Be Proud Of

The bigger, more powerful Cobra gets a fixed top for covered comfort.

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May 29 • 1:14 PM EDT • Technology • carbuzz.com
Questions surround shellfish workforce appropriation tucked into budget

The small appropriation would direct as much as $75K to the FSAA's Executive Director.

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May 29 • 1:06 PM EDT • Politics • floridapolitics.com
Legislation would extend funding for rural Maine hospitals

The current test program is set to expire at the end of this year: “We have a very high reliance on public payers. And oftentimes, those payers don’t reimburse the hospitals that provide care even at the level that it costs hospitals to provide that care."

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May 29 • 1:00 PM EDT • Politics • spectrumlocalnews.com
Ron DeSantis says Miami-Dade, Palm Beach should be more aggressive in slashing homestead taxes

Big cities would already be on the hook for rural areas with lower tax bases, but DeSantis thinks they can do even more.

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May 29 • 12:01 PM EDT • Politics • floridapolitics.com
Brandon McGinley: Allegheny County can support parents without chasing away business

If Pittsburgh’s maternity wards offered a punch card, my wife and I would probably have earned a freebie by now. Though we might have to argue with...

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May 29 • 12:00 PM EDT • Business • post-gazette.com
Trump holds Situation Room meeting to decide on Iran deal

Trump faced a politically fraught decision to enter an agreement that would invariably require significant concessions to Tehran.

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May 29 • 11:42 AM EDT • Politics • latimes.com
Auburn city budget vote delayed

It comes as the proposal includes an 8% property tax increase, which would go above the state cap.

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May 29 • 11:05 AM EDT • Politics • spectrumlocalnews.com
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Mirror life: Scientists clash over threat of lab-engineered bacteria

Bacteria created using mirror images of natural biomolecules would pose a grave threat to life on Earth, some researchers warn, but a new study suggests they would struggle to survive in the wild

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May 29 • 7:00 AM EDT • Science • newscientist.com
The NBA Finals are a reward for long-suffering Knicks fans

ESPN’s Mike Breen, a New York Knicks fan who has called games for more than two decades, said he would “be lying if I didn’t say there are emotions.”

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May 29 • 6:12 AM EDT • Sports • nbcnews.com
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Exclusive | Flavor Maker IFF Nears $4 Billion Deal to Sell Food Ingredients Business to CVC

A sale of IFF’s largest division would be the company’s latest move to boost profitability.

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May 29 • 4:53 AM EDT • Business • wsj.com