EXCERPTS: The First Ministers of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland will sign a landmark agreement on Monday to pressure Downing Street to hold referendums on independence. SNP leader John Swinney, Plaid Cymru leader Rhun ap Iorwerth and Sinn Féin vice president Michelle O’Neill will meet in Cardiff on Monday.
Swinney went as far as suggesting that Burnham is ‘facing up to the idea that he will go down in history as the final prime minister of the United Kingdom’.
The three are expected to sign a memorandum of understanding pushing for referendums in their respective countries. The meeting is as party leaders – not as officials of their respective governments.
[...] Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday Show, Scottish Education Secretary Mairi McAllan said: ‘An independence referendum is not off the table. ‘We devote time to it because it is the transformational change that allows Scotland to stand on its own two feet in the world and to fulsomely pursue the better that we want.’
The ‘status quo in the UK is unsustainable’, Ms McAllan added, pointing to the First Ministers of both Northern Ireland and Wales being in support of leaving the UK.
‘The only people who, until last week anyway, didn’t appear to understand that were the UK Government. But the Prime Minister stood at the despatch box in the House of Commons last week and was clear that Scotland must have a route to choose our own future, so we just want that agreed now in a legal format so that we can take forward our mandate in Scotland.’ (MORE - missing details)
INTRO: A Russian drone has hit a train near the Ukraine-Poland border shortly after former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and top European security officials had passed through. No casualties were reported after the Russian strike at Yahodyn, which hit the train's engine. All the passengers had been evacuated, Ukrainian authorities said. Russia said it struck "railway infrastructure" in western Ukraine.
Johnson and some of Europe's most senior security advisers, including the UK's Jonathan Powell, had passed along the same line on their way back from a conference in the capital, Kyiv. The former PM said "I don't know what warped logic drove Putin to blow up a stationary Ukrainian locomotive on the Polish border this morning" and asked "When are we going to give them the air defences they need?"
Ukraine's state railway company Ukrzaliznytsia said a jet-propelled drone had been detected and an evacuation order had been given 15 minutes before the strike. It confirmed the train carrying Johnson and others had earlier been at Yahodyn station - and said a decision had been made for it to depart earlier than scheduled.
"Quite possibly, the target of this drone could have been the diplomatic train, which had left the station earlier than expected because of the timetable change... due to constant threats of Russian strikes," Ukrzaliznytsia said.
The railway authority also said former CIA chief David Petraeus had been on board another train at Yahodyn station at the time of the drone strike. The Polish authorities said a Russian drone had struck 2km from the Polish border.
Former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, who had also attended the conference in Kyiv, told the BBC passengers on board his train had been told to prepare for evacuation before subsequently being allowed to porcedd with their journey.
"On the train I was on we received order to prepare evacuation after it had stopped. But after a number of minutes we were informed that it was clear and we could proceed," he said.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the "barbaric strikes" at the Ukraine-Poland border in Yahodyn amounted to "Putin's terror 'knocking' directly on the doors of the EU and Nato" and renewed calls for more sanctions on Moscow.
"Putin needs to understand that his barbarism will be met with decisive action that increases the cost of war for him to an unacceptable level. This is the only way to stop him," he said.
Russia has in recent months carried out a number of deadly attacks targeting Ukraine's trains, railway depots and other transport facilities. Earlier this month, six employees of the state railway company Ukrzaliznytsia were killed after a depot was hit in Kyiv... (MORE - details)
BORIS JOHNSON: ‘When are we going to give them [Ukraine] the air defences they need? Why won’t we unfreeze Putin’s cash and give it to Ukraine? There is more than €140 billion in a Belgian bank account – and about £10 billion in London. Britain could show a lead. The Ukrainians are going to win – that much was clear from the last three days in their wonderful country. But we will get this dreadful war over much faster if we all get serious and give them what they need and deserve.’
EXCERPTS: For most of the history of forensic DNA testing, identical twins presented police and courts with a problem that seemed almost impossible to solve.
Identical twins share nearly 100 percent of their DNA, so if DNA from one twin was found at a crime scene, the police could not tell which twin it belonged to—leaving investigators unable to determine who the culprit was.
In practice, this could make DNA evidence much less useful. If investigators found a genetic profile that matched two identical twins, the result might show that one of them was involved without revealing which one. That could leave prosecutors relying on other evidence such as phone records, surveillance, witnesses, or fingerprints; and sometimes that’s just not available.
And this is not just some hypothetical. Identical twins have complicated criminal investigations for well over a century, long before DNA testing entered the courtroom. Some have gotten away with crime thanks to their twin sister or brother.
[...] Identical twins begin with essentially the same genome. However, ‘identical’ does not mean genetically frozen in perfect lockstep.
When cells copy their DNA, they occasionally make mistakes or ‘mutations’. Most have no noticeable effect, but some mutations can arise after the embryo splits into two twins. If such a mutation occurs early enough, it can spread through many cells in one twin while remaining absent from the other.
Scientists began trying to find these minute genetic differences by looking far beyond the handful of markers used in conventional forensic testing.
[...] However, the differences between identical twins can be extremely rare. They may appear in only a small fraction of their cells, making them difficult to detect, verify, and use reliably as forensic evidence. Plus, finding a difference in the twins is only half the problem. Scientists must still demonstrate that the same mutation is present in the crime-scene sample and establish how strongly that evidence favors one twin over the other.
[...] The most important change is that investigators no longer have to treat an identical twin DNA match as an absolute dead end.
A conventional DNA profile may still leave two twins looking identical. However, scientists can now go deeper, searching the genome for mutations acquired as the twins developed and using extremely deep sequencing to detect variants that may exist in only a small fraction of cells... (MORE - details, specific crime cases covered)
EXCERPT: Two weeks later, the boy was back in the hospital, and the marks were worse. They were bigger, darker, and tender. There were patches of pink, and some of his skin was visibly breaking down. A picture of the marks is here.
Based on the appearance, the doctors started reconsidering some sort of bruising and started asking him more questions. This is when he mentioned that he was homeschooled and used a laptop for his schoolwork. He said he typically did his work by resting his laptop on his abdomen while he worked, sometimes for up to eight hours a day, and often while the laptop was charging. Then they understood what it was.
The doctors diagnosed the boy with erythema ab igne (EAI), which translates from Latin as “redness from fire” and is also sometimes called “toasted skin syndrome.” This is a skin condition caused by repeated, prolonged exposure to low-grade heat—heat not hot enough to cause actual burns. It’s most often seen in adults, and common causes include using heating pads or hot water bottles for chronic pain or sitting too close to space heaters. Some people also develop it from certain occupational hazards, like glassblowing and metal work. EAI produces a lace-like rash, just like the boy’s.
It’s unclear how EAI develops exactly. But researchers hypothesize that chronic heat exposure leads to damage to superficial blood vessels and the release of red blood cells, forming the tell-tale red reticulated pattern.
While the boy’s condition looked ominous, the good news is that EAI is generally benign and reversible—once you remove the heat source. For severe or long-term conditions, some pigmentation and scarring can remain. But the boy’s parents checked back in over several months, reporting that the rash faded and then completely resolved. Hopefully, he also got some sort of laptop stand. (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: Yildiz and colleagues theorize that the sun's act of planetary infanticide may help to explain differences between observations of the sun and what is predicted by models of stellar evolution. This includes the depth of the sun's convection zone and the so-called sound-speed structure just below the convection zone. It could also explain why the surface of the sun is depleted of the element lithium.
"By modelling the sun's evolution and comparing the results with precise observations of its interior, we find that the ingestion of a super-Earth could help explain long-standing differences between standard solar models and observations, including subtle changes in the sun's internal structure and its depleted lithium abundance," Yildiz said. "We were interested in whether these problems might have a common origin in the early chemical history of the sun."
The researcher explained that young stars like the sun during its infancy are surrounded by vast flattened clouds of gas and dust called protoplanetary discs, where substantial amounts of material can move between the disc and the star.
"Since planets are made of material that is chemically different from the gas in the disc, we wondered whether the early engulfment of a planet could have left a chemical signature inside the young sun," Yildiz said.
[...] Their results found the best fit for the sun's current characteristics was the cannibalism of a planet between five and ten times the mass of the Earth, a type of planet called a super-Earth. This could explain the strange, unpredicted characteristics of the sun.
[....] "The earlier work proposed that a super-Earth could have formed and migrated into the young sun. Our paper asks whether the sun itself could still carry observable evidence that such an engulfment actually happened, and we believe it could," Yildiz concluded. "The next step is to see if these fingerprints can be independently detected... (MORE - missing details)
I've never watched Friends to any significant degree, either. And Norman Lear shows do look dated because of the very topicality that prodded viewers to watch them back then. Seinfeld did play on all sorts of things that would be taboo now to current Woke authorities, but even the studio suits didn't consider those to be "controversial issues" in the '90s.
The 1990s did have one flaw -- it regarded children as detrimental to comedy (like in Frasier and even in Raymond). But the 2000s re-discovered how to make kids funny by no longer treating them like ideal angels or over-protectng them (Malcolm in the Middle, Modern Family, and the The Middle itself.). "Rediscovered" in the sense of Married with Children mining that first in the 1980s. Or much further back, the "too benign" mischievousness of DTM or LITB.
VIDEO EXCERPTS: But you have spoken about writer rooms becoming very touchy about politics.
I think so many writers and actors would say they can't do the comedy today that they were able to do back then. With Seinfeld you'd probably hear the same thing.
There are these clips on YouTube of young people watching old segments of a show called All in the Family. Where Carroll O'Connor played a character called Archie Bunker, who was really sort of racist. And they can't believe what they were seeing in these clips.
And I think the problem with that show, is it's not that racism was presented as something positive. It's just that he was so lovable. You know, it was really weird that audiences fell in love with this guy. But it was just a funny show and it really made fun of that stuff, and you can't do that anymore. Perhaps there's a little pushback now from stand-up comedians, maybe, but that's it.
With Raymond and The Middle, those shows were very family-oriented. So politics rarely came in. Never on Raymond. You know. Philip Rosenthal the creator, was very clear about never doing anything topical. Because he didn't want to age the show. Not that he didn't have his own political opinions. He just didn't want the show to ever feel like, "Oh, that was back then in the '90s because that's the things they were talking about."
And as you see, the show continues to just go on and on, and new audiences are finding it because it's evergreen. Because family, marriage, kids, in-laws, and those are things that the whole world can relate to everywhere in the world, every generation. It doesn't really change. And so that's the beauty, and that's truly great writing.
The same with The Middle where it's a family in Indiana, and they're just dealing with not having very much money and trying to raise their kids and living from paycheck to paycheck. And that's really relatable, but it's still a positive show about how important family is no matter what your circumstances are.
I've seen people, as you say, they look online, and they're looking at Friends as well. And there are jokes about the Chandler's mother or father, the trans father. Things like that, I suppose, are looking dated to a later generation. But I don't know why they can't understand that it is a product of its time.
You know, I've never watched Friends.
Oh, wow. Because when was Friends, in the 90s?
Same time as Raymond, I guess. Maybe it started just before. [...] So I kind of missed the 90s because I was raising my kids and working.
[...] You mentioned young writers rejecting a character as being homophobic.
Yeah, there was one incident that I heard about where the character was like a former Marine who didn't like hugging, was very uncomfortable with it. And the younger writers in the room said, "You can't write that because it's homophobic." And the older writers were saying, but how is he going to make a journey to get to a place where he's comfortable just hugging another person if you don't start him there?
You have to have the conflict. So that is an issue where somebody doesn't understand character development as a writer, because your politics and your feelings are getting in the way of writing truthfully. That's a problem because comedy especially comes from pain. All comedy comes from pain and struggle...
