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Artist’s impression of GRB 211211A. Scientists have linked this unusual gamma-ray burst from a nearby galaxy to a neutron star merger. Credit: Soheb Mandhai @TheAstroPhoenix An unusually powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB 211211A), detected from a nearby galaxy, has been linked to a neutron star merger by an international team of scientists. This burst, notable for its excess of infrared light, was shown to originate from a kilonova, an event thought to occur when neutron stars collide. Scientists have linked a highly unusual blast of high-energy light from a nearby galaxy to a neutron star merger. The event, detected in December...

Republican presidential hopefuls will line up on August 23 for the first round of primary debates. For conservatives who lived through the late 1970s and the 1980s, Ronald Reagan set a standard for how to behave as a candidate and then how to lead as a president. What were the traits and accomplishments that made Reagan the model for many subsequent GOP candidates? For me, six come to mind. First, he could win elections. It may sound trite, but the first important test for any political candidate is the ability to win. It is even more important to win reelection,...

Severe thunderstorms in the first half of 2023 caused a record amount in insured losses, underscoring the impact of climate change on extreme weather events, according to new research for the Swiss Re Group. A recent report from the group found severe thunderstorms in the first six months of the year caused $34 billion in damages, the highest insured losses ever recorded in a six-month period. Ten events prompted losses of $1 billion and more each, compared to an annual average of six events during the past 10 years. The most affected state was Texas, the report found.

The Atlantic Ocean is running a fever. Waters off Florida have become a hot tub, bleaching the third-largest barrier reef in the world. Off the coast of Ireland, extreme heat was implicated in the mass death of seabirds. For years, the north Atlantic was warming more slowly than other parts of the world. But now it has caught up, and then some. Last month, the sea surface there surged to a record 25°C—nearly 1°C warmer than the previous high, set in 2020—and temperatures haven’t even peaked yet. “This year it’s been crazy,” says Tianle Yuan, an atmospheric physicist at NASA’s...

An Army installation in Texas has been struggling to put food on the table for its soldiers for months as the base faces a shortage of cooks to staff its dining facilities. Fort Cavazos, Texas, previously known as Fort Hood, has struggled to provide its junior enlisted troops with meals for months, with the base only opening two of its 10 major dining facilities for much of the summer and with limited times, according to a report Tuesday from Military.com.According to the report, the base has faced a shortage of cooks to man the dining facilities around base, with many...

Florida State University criminology professor Eric Stewart built a career around the premise that systemic racism has warped law enforcement. He wrote many papers purporting to prove this point. So far, six of those published in major academic journals like Criminology and Law and Society Review have been fully retracted because of data that was fake or so bad that the papers should not have been published. Florida State University in Tallahassee, Provost James Clark terminated the tenured professor saying "I do not see how you can teach our students to be ethical researchers or how the results of future...

Craig Robertson was shot and killed during an FBI raid early Wednesday morning. A Utah man was shot and killed during an FBI raid early Wednesday morning, the FBI confirmed to ABC News. The raid was in connection with an investigation into alleged threats against President Joe Biden and others, according to two officials briefed on the case. One of the officials told ABC News that the investigation began in April and the U.S. Secret Service was notified by the FBI in June. In addition to threatening posts, the official said, the man under investigation suggested online he was making...

PROVO — A Provo man who had allegedly been making threatening comments on social media about President Joe Biden — including making comments about a "sniper" during the president's visit to Utah on Wednesday — was shot and killed while agents were serving a search and arrest warrant at his residence. About 6:15 a.m., FBI agents were serving search and arrest warrants at the residence of 75-year-old Craig Deeleuw Robertson. During the service of those warrants, Robertson was shot and killed. No other information about what happened was immediately released

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — On Wednesday morning, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that he will be suspending State Attorney Monique H. Worrell, citing neglect of duty. DeSantis made the announcement, saying Worrell's criminal justice administration has been, "clearly and fundamentally derelict, so as to constitute neglect of duty and incompetence."

Local officials in Russia say an explosion at an optical plant in the city of Sergiyev Posad, about 70 kilometers outside Moscow, killed one person and injured at least 43 people on August 9. Five of the injured are in intensive care with serious burns or head injuries, according to the city administration's Telegram account. Some of the 43 people admitted to a regional hospital have shrapnel injuries, it said. Officials at the city’s central hospital said that a woman had succumbed to wounds sustained in the blast. Independent Telegram channel Baza shared images of a tall cloud of smoke...

Best Buy's diversity and inclusivity banning white people?

Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign has been informed by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) that $2.6 million of his donations have been incorrectly labeled for use in the presidential primary, and must instead be only used for general election funds. This strips almost another 30 percent of campaign cash away from the Florida Governor’s coffers, already threatened by overspending and a drying up of donations.The financial state of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign has many political observers wondering if the Florida Governor can even make it to the Iowa Caucuses in January.According to FEC data, the DeSantis campaign had just over $9...

New York City taxpayers may spend $12 billion on waves of border crossers and illegal aliens arriving in the city daily, triple the cost previously projected by Mayor Eric Adams (D). On Wednesday, Adams announced that nearly 100,000 border crossers and illegal aliens have arrived in New York City since the spring of last year — about 18 times the population of Saratoga, New York. Close to 60,000 of those migrants remain living off city taxpayers.

Former Houser Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said he supports the opening of an impeachment inquiry into President Biden but advised Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to “go very slow” in the process. “Open the inquiry, but go very slow,” Gingrich told NBC News. “We should open the inquiry, because it allows them to ask a broader range of questions,” Gingrich continued. “But we should move very, very, very slowly beyond that.” McCarthy said last month that the findings from GOP probes into the Biden family’s foreign business activities “rise to the level of an impeachment inquiry.”

An Army installation in Texas has been struggling to put food on the table for its soldiers for months as the base faces a shortage of cooks to staff its dining facilities. Fort Cavazos, Texas, previously known as Fort Hood, has struggled to provide its junior enlisted troops with meals for months, with the base only opening two of its 10 major dining facilities for much of the summer and with limited times, according to a report Tuesday from Military.com. According to the report, the base has faced a shortage of cooks to man the dining facilities around base, with...

Aug. 9 (UPI) -- Australian police are seeking answers in connection to the poisoning of three people who died after eating wild mushrooms at a dinner served in Leongatha, Australia. The three deceased victims, who fell ill after eating on July 29, have been identified as Gail Patterson, her husband, Don Patterson, and her sister Heather Wilkinson. Heather Wilkinson's husband, the Rev. Ian Wilkinson, also was poisoned and is awaiting a liver transplant. The victims became ill after eating dinner at the home of Erin Patterson, Gail and Don Patterson's former daughter-in-law. Erin Patterson and her two children did not...

The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed the Biden administration to temporarily reinstate a rule by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives regulating “ghost guns” while a challenge to the rule continues in a federal appeals court. In June, a federal judge in Fort Worth, Texas, had barred the ATF from enforcing the rule anywhere in the United States. Urging the justices to intervene, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar had told the justices that the order by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor was “irreparably harming the public and the government by reopening the floodgates to the tide of untraceable...

A migrant at the newly opened shelter in Brooklyn’s popular McCarren Park raved to The Post on Tuesday life is good — with three hot meals a day, spacious clean living quarters and use of the leafy refuge’s pool. “They treat us very well,” said Miguel Mujica, a 39-year-old dad of two from Venezuela. “There’s nothing they stop us from doing.” Mujica has been staying at the McCarren Play Center in trendy Williamsburg since Saturday, a day after the city set up 100 military cots for asylum-seekers there to help take pressure off city shelters that are bursting at the...

World leaders must act as “ringmasters” to transition the global economy away from fossil fuels in order to combat the supposed impending doom of climate change, the United Nation’s top climate scientist has argued. Professor Jim Skea, who was recently installed as the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the top UN body on climate change science, said that political leaders need to act as the “ringmasters or ringmistresses” of ushering in the globalist green agenda and force people into shifting away from a fossil fuel-based economy. Speaking to London’s Evening Standard newspaper, Skea said that climate...

Charles McGonigal, a former FBI agent who helped lead the investigation into Trump-Russia connections, is expected to plead guilty to charges of unlawfully working for a Russian oligarch.In an ironic turn of events, one of the individuals who worked tirelessly to take down former President Donald Trump by falsely accusing him of secretly collaborating with Russian officials and hackers was, in fact, the one engaging with influential Russians at the time.McGonigal, 54, a former top FBI counterintelligence agent based in New York, was charged in January with money laundering and violating United States sanctions by working for a Russian oligarch...