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Miami Herald
16-06-2025
- Politics
- Miami Herald
On the streets, Americans gave Trump the biggest public rebuke of his second term
President Donald Trump's second term in the White House has been different from his first one — he's emboldened and has moved quicker and more aggressively on his agenda. He's governing like he has a mandate after the 2024 election — and in some ways, that's true. Unlike in his 2016 victory, he won not only the Electoral College but the popular vote — becoming only the second Republican to do so since 1988 — and carried all seven battleground states by comfortable margins. 'The American people have given us a mandate, a mandate like few people thought possible,' Trump said after the election. Since then, there's been a sense of 'This is what America wanted' as Trump moved to strip legal protection from certain migrants, ignored due process and concentrated more power in his own hands. But is this truly what America wants? The 'No Kings' protests that happened in Florida and across the nation suggest that Trump's mandate only goes so far. Indeed, his popular-vote winning margin of 1.5% was the smallest by an elected president since Richard Nixon's in 1968, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California Santa Barbara. According to protest organizers, an estimated 5 million people attended more than 2,000 demonstrations planned nationwide on Saturday, NPR reported. Thousands attended protests in Miami, Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale combined. Some might have expected larger crowds in Miami, given the large number of people affected by Trump's revocation of deportation protections for Venezuelans, Cubans and others. But Miami-Dade County also flipped from blue to red during last year's presidential election. Regardless, this was so far the largest public display of discontent with the second Trump presidency — and it was a loud one, taking at least some attention away from the military parade he wanted for so long, which also took place on Saturday in Washington, D.C. For a president who's obsessed with image and TV coverage, the footage and photos of people rebuking him as they flew American flags must not have sat well. The fact that the protests were largely peaceful also robbed him of an opportunity to instill fear and threaten to send Marines to Democratically-run cities to boost his 'law and order' credentials. The protesters were not 'foreign invaders,' Antifa or extremists, as Trump and his allies would like the American people to believe. The demonstrators who spoke to the Herald Editorial Board in Fort Lauderdale were everyday people, some of whom said they felt they had no option but to take to the streets to protect democracy. Some of them told the Editorial Board they believe the U.S. is already a dictatorship. It isn't, but Trump's undemocratic tendencies are undeniable. He's attacked judges who ruled against his administration, used his power to penalize law firms that did legal work he doesn't like and deported people without giving them due process. Meanwhile, he's trying to turn nonpartisan federal service into a politicized system where loyalty to him by federal workers would be rewarded over merit, the Washington Post reported Monday. Protests certainly won't be enough to force Trump to change course, and it's still early to say whether they mean the Republican Party will underperform in next year's midterms. But the millions of Americans wondering whether they are alone in their concern about America's undemocratic turn or Trump's cruelty toward migrants here, legally and illegally, don't need to wonder anymore. On Saturday, it was clear that there are many people who know this is not what America is about. Click here to send the letter.
Miami Herald
13-06-2025
- Climate
- Miami Herald
Floods kill 78 people in South Africa after record rainfall
Floods killed at least 78 people after record rainfall in South Africa's impoverished Eastern Cape province. On June 9, a winter storm dropped 129 millimeters (5.1 inches) of rain on the town of Mthatha, close to Nelson Mandela's burial site, nearly doubling the previous record, according to preliminary data from the South African Weather Service. Elliot weather station recorded 160 millimeters, about four times the previous high in 1997. The storm was part of a wider weather system that also brought snow to parts of the Eastern Cape and the neighboring KwaZulu-Natal province. The resulting floods proved deadly as houses near rivers were engulfed and vehicles swept off bridges. The floods are the latest in a series of adverse weather events to hit South Africa. Last year Cape Town had record rainfall in July and tens of thousands of homes were damaged. In 2022 at least 459 people died when torrential rains hit the port city of Durban. Even before the floods, large parts of South Africa - including regions in the Eastern Cape - had seen the wettest month on record through June 5, preliminary data from the University of California Santa Barbara's Climate Hazards Center show. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa changed his schedule on Friday to visit disaster-struck areas in the affected province, where much of the population lives in hard-to-access rural areas. Global warming is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, from violent storms and flooding to droughts and wild fires. Scientists have warned that an accelerated water cycle is locked into the world's climate system due to past and projected greenhouse gas emissions, and is now irreversible. Scientists say their existing models may have underestimated the extent to which global warming is causing extreme rainfall. The communities that tend to pay the highest price are often in poorer countries, where environments can be more fragile and governance more patchy, and there are fewer resources to bounce back after a disaster. Last year, the Spanish region of Valencia was struck by a catastrophic downpour that caused over 200 deaths and billions of dollars in insurance losses, while Hurricane Helene unleashed historic floods IN the U.S. Southeast, killing at least 166 people. Sign up here for the twice-weekly Next Africa newsletter, and subscribe to the Next Africa podcast on Apple, Spotify or anywhere you listen. Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
The Universe's Largest Map Has Arrived, And You Can Stargaze Like Never Before
After many hours of staring unblinking at a small patch of sky, JWST has given us the most detailed map ever obtained of a corner of the Universe. It's called the COSMOS-Web field, and if that sounds familiar, it's probably because an incredible image of it dropped just a month ago. That, however, was just a little taste of what has now come to pass. The full, interactive map and all the data have just dropped, a map that vastly outstrips the famous Hubble Ultra Deep Field's 10,000 galaxies. The new map contains nearly 800,000 galaxies – hopefully heralding in a new era of discovery in the deepest recesses of the Universe. "Our goal was to construct this deep field of space on a physical scale that far exceeded anything that had been done before," says physicist Caitlin Casey of the University of California Santa Barbara, who co-leads the COSMOS collaboration with Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology. "If you had a printout of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field on a standard piece of paper, our image would be slightly larger than a 13-foot by 13-foot-wide mural, at the same depth. So it's really strikingly large." JWST is our best hope for understanding the Cosmic Dawn, the first billion or so years after the Big Bang, which took place around 13.8 billion years ago. This epoch of the Universe is extremely difficult to observe: it's very far away, and very faint. Because the Universe is expanding, the light that travels to us from greater distances is stretched into redder wavelengths. With its powerful resolution and infrared capabilities, JWST was designed for just these observations: finding the faint light from the dawn of time which informs us on the processes that gave rise to the Universe we see around us today. The COSMOS-Web image covers a patch of sky a little bigger than the area of 7.5 full Moons, and peers back as far as 13.5 billion years, right into the time when the opaque primordial fog that suffused the early Universe was beginning to clear. There, the researchers are looking not just for early galaxies, they're looking for an entire cosmic ecosystem – an interactive gravitational dance of objects bound by the cosmic web of dark matter that spans the entire Universe. JWST data collected to date indicates that even with Hubble data, we've barely scratched the surface of what lurks within the Cosmic Dawn. "The Big Bang happens and things take time to gravitationally collapse and form, and for stars to turn on. There's a timescale associated with that," Casey says. "And the big surprise is that with JWST, we see roughly ten times more galaxies than expected at these incredible distances. We're also seeing supermassive black holes that are not even visible with Hubble." This profusion of well-formed galaxies hasn't just surprised astronomers – it's given them a whopping great puzzle to solve. According to our current understanding of galaxy evolution, not enough time had elapsed since the Big Bang for them to have formed. Even one is a bit of a head-scratcher – but the numbers in which JWST is finding them just boggle the mind. With access to datasets free and available to everyone who wants to take a crack, however, we may get a few answers. "A big part of this project is the democratization of science and making tools and data from the best telescopes accessible to the broader community," Casey says. "The best science is really done when everyone thinks about the same data set differently. It's not just for one group of people to figure out the mysteries." Papers on the data have been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal and Astronomy & Astrophysics. Meanwhile, you can head over to the COSMOS-Web interactive website and muck about zooming through the Universe nearly all the way back to the beginning of time. Giant Jets Bigger Than The Milky Way Seen Shooting From Black Hole Humanity Has Just Glimpsed Part of The Sun We've Never Seen Before 'City-Killer' Asteroid Even More Likely to Hit The Moon in 2032
Axios
25-05-2025
- Business
- Axios
College graduates are anxious about entering a rocky job market
The Class of 2025 is begrudgingly entering a job market that is not welcoming them with open arms. Why it matters: New grads are pessimistic entering the workforce, as the economy could slow. History shows that people who started their careers during economic downturns struggle throughout their lives. "I'm excited to graduate and I worked really hard and I've loved these four years of college, but it does make me wish that I had more security," said Emma Crump, a senior studying sociology at the University of California Santa Barbara. Crump, 22, is enrolled in a class where she has to apply for three jobs weekly. She's heard back from three, and all were rejections. Zoom out: "It's a little paradoxical, where for the last several years there was this talent shortage, so candidates have this power," Lindsey Zuloaga, chief data scientist for Utah-based hiring platform HireVue, said. "But it's shifted in some ways and not others. Because of economic uncertainty, there's a lot less moving around happening, and that's tightening things up." State of play: American pessimism about a looming U.S. recession is high, even if the economy doesn't reach that point. Historical data shows that graduating into a recession can have lasting negative effects on salaries and health. Graduating into economic turmoil is nothing new for Gen Z. The pandemic upended post-grad plans for the classes of 2020 and 2021. Case in point: Sohan Bhakta, a computer science senior at the University of Arizona, applied to more than 600 jobs during the school year, with few interviews. "The talk was, you'd be guaranteed a gig," Bhakta, 22, said. "And I don't know why I expected that. From this world, you should never expect anything because anything can change." If he doesn't land a computer science role at the end of his six-month internship in September, he's considering pivoting to data engineering or data analytics to work more closely with AI. Sabrina Valencia, 30, pivoted her human resources job hunt from full-time roles to internships after applying for about 70 jobs to no avail. "I didn't realize how hard it was going to be just to get into even an entry level at that point," said Valencia, who graduated from Western Governors University in April. She's also exploring an extra certification. Driving the news: More than half of current college seniors are pessimistic about the job market, per an April report from Handshake, an entry-level job platform. As of March, the average class of 2025 student had submitted 21% more job applications on the platform than their 2024 counterparts. That upswing "reflects heightened anxiety and urgency around the early-career job search, while simultaneously contributing to increased competition for jobs," the report said. Threat level: Young adults who enter the workforce during recessions have historically had lower long-term earnings, higher rates of disability, fewer marriages, less successful spouses and fewer children, according to a 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research report. In middle age, they have had higher mortality caused by lung, liver and heart disease. "The bad luck of leaving school during hard times can lead to higher rates of early death and permanent differences in life circumstances," a 2019 Stanford report said.
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Scientists Discovered Structural, Brain-Wide Changes During Menstruation
The constant ebb and flow of hormones that guide the menstrual cycle don't just affect reproductive anatomy. They also reshape the brain, and research gives us insight into how this happens. Led by neuroscientists Elizabeth Rizor and Viktoriya Babenko of the University of California Santa Barbara, a team of researchers tracked 30 women over their menstrual cycles, documenting in detail the structural changes that take place in the brain as hormonal profiles fluctuate. The results, published in a peer-reviewed study in 2023, suggest that structural changes in the brain during menstruation may not be limited to those regions associated with the menstrual cycle. "These results are the first to report simultaneous brain-wide changes in human white matter microstructure and cortical thickness coinciding with menstrual cycle-driven hormone rhythms," the researchers wrote. "Strong brain-hormone interaction effects may not be limited to classically known hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal-axis (HPG-axis) receptor-dense regions." Menstruation typically means experiencing some 450 or so periods during the course of a lifetime, so it would be nice to know the different effects they can have on the body, really. However, although it is something that happens to half the world's population for half their lives, research has been somewhat lacking. Who knows why. Total mystery. Seriously. Most of the research on the hormonal effect on the brain has been focused on brain communication during cognitive tasks, not the actual structures themselves. "Cyclic fluctuations in HPG-axis hormones exert powerful behavioral, structural, and functional effects through actions on the mammalian central nervous system," Rizor, Babenko, and their team noted. "Yet, very little is known about how these fluctuations alter the structural nodes and information highways of the human brain." The microstructure of white matter – the fatty network of neuronal fibers that transfer information between regions of gray matter – has been found to change with hormonal shifts, including puberty, oral contraception use, gender-affirming hormone therapy, and post-menopausal estrogen therapy. To address the menstruation gap in our understanding, the team took MRI scans of their subjects during three menstrual phases: menses, ovulation, and mid-luteal. At the time of each of these scans, the researchers also measured the participants' hormone levels. The results showed that, as hormones fluctuate, gray and white matter volumes change too, as does the volume of cerebrospinal fluid. In particular, just before ovulation, when the hormones 17β-estradiol and luteinizing hormone rise, the brains of the participants showed white matter changes suggesting faster information transfer. Follicle-stimulating hormone, which rises before ovulation, and helps stimulate the ovary follicles, was associated with thicker gray matter. Progesterone, which rises after ovulation, was associated with increased tissue and decreased cerebrospinal fluid volume. What this means for the person driving the brain is unknown, but the research lays the groundwork for future studies, and perhaps understanding the causes of unusual but severe period-related mental health problems. A separate study published in 2024 by an international team of scientists found each phase of the menstrual cycle had a distinct influence over the brain as a whole, with changes across the brain and in specific regions found to also be related to an individual's age. "Although we do not currently report functional consequences or correlates of structural brain changes, our findings may have implications for hormone-driven alterations in behavior and cognition," the researchers wrote. "Investigation of brain-hormone relationships across networks is necessary to understand human nervous system functioning on a daily basis, during hormone transition periods, and across the human lifespan." The findings are reported in Human Brain Mapping. An earlier version of this article was published in October 2023. Ultra-Processed Foods Linked to Early Signs of Parkinson's Disease AI Discovers Suspected Trigger of Alzheimer's, And Maybe a Treatment One Stage of Sleep Seems Critical For Reducing Risk of Dementia
