This is an interesting new development. It’s no longer a referendum on someone’s age, but more about policies.
President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race for the White House on Sunday, ending his bid for reelection.
He has endorsed current Vice President Kamala Harris and encouraged his party to unite behind her. And it totally changes the dynamic of the election.
I wonder who will get the eventual nomination. Probably Harris, since she is the current VP and has been endorsed by Biden. I’d guess any other potential candidates will fall in line this late in the campaign.
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”
Republican VP Nominee J.D. Vance wrote a foreword for a book that the Heritage Foundation’s president wrote that echoed much of Project 2025’s mandate.
“While Project 2025’s coordinators previously told Newsweek that it ‘does not speak for any candidate or campaign,’ it was written in conjunction with a host of former Trump staffers, as many as 140, according to an analysis by CNN.
“Last month, Vance posted on X, formerly Twitter, about writing a foreword for Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ new book, Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America, saying he was ‘thrilled’ to have done so and that the book contained ‘a bold new vision for the future of conservatism in America.’
“Vance also contributed a review for the book ahead of its release in September, writing:
‘Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism.’
‘We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets.’
‘In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.’
“There are topics from the blurb that echo Project 2025’s proposals. For example, Roberts writes that the Department of Education (DOE) and the FBI are ‘too corrupt to save.’ Project 2025 states that the DOE should be shut down and describes overhauling the FBI, calling it a ‘bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization.'”
“The African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, typically lives in the streams and ponds of sub-Saharan Africa, scavenging for food that it rips apart with its feet. In January, researchers at the University of Vermont and Tufts University published a report that gave the amphibian a different lot in life. They harvested its embryonic skin and heart cells and reassembled the living matter into robotic devices — transforming Xenopus into xenobot.
“Xenobots are the first robots made completely of living materials. They’re designed on a supercomputer running software that emulates natural selection: Algorithms determine possible effective tissue configurations for a xenobot to perform a specified task, such as moving through fluids or carrying a payload. The most promising designs are sculpted with tiny forceps and cauterizing irons, then set free in petri dishes, where the specks of amphibian flesh live for about a week before decomposing. There are no electronics involved. Behaviors are programmed entirely through the structural arrangement of the pulsating heart cells held in a matrix of rigid skin cells.
“Although xenobots can’t yet do much more than crawl or swim, the researchers see great potential for them to aid in fields like medicine and environmental remediation. In the future, xenobots could be engineered to deliver drugs through the human body or to gather up microplastics in oceans, politely biodegrading when the job is done.”
“Former President Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday with the most dishonest speech of the four-day Republican National Convention, making more than 20 false claims by CNN’s count.
“Many of the false claims were ones Trump has made before, some of them for years. They spanned a wide variety of topics, including the economy, immigration, crime, foreign policy and elections. Some of them were wild lies, others smaller exaggerations. Some were in his prepared text (like the absurd claim that he left the Biden administration a world at peace), while he ad-libbed others (such as his usual lies that Democrats cheated in the 2020 election and that the US is experiencing the worst inflation it has ever had).”
“Authors have expressed their shock after the news that academic publisher Taylor & Francis, which owns Routledge, had sold access to its authors’ research as part of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnership with Microsoft.”
In this news article from Reuters, “The World Court, the United Nations’ highest court, said on Friday that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories and settlements there is illegal and should be withdrawn as soon as possible, in its strongest findings to date on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
“The advisory opinion by judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), known as the World Court, was not binding but carries weight under international law and may weaken support for Israel.
“‘Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the regime associated with them, have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law,’ President Nawaf Salam said, reading the findings of a 15-judge panel.
“The court said Israel’s obligations include paying restitution for harm and ‘the evacuation of all settlers from existing settlements’. In a swift reaction, Israel’s foreign ministry rejected the opinion as ‘fundamentally wrong’ and one-sided, and repeated its stance that a political settlement in the region can only be reached by negotiations.
“‘The Jewish nation cannot be an occupier in its own land,’ Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement. Israel Gantz, head of the Binyamin Regional Council, one of the largest settler councils, said the ICJ opinion was ‘contrary to the Bible, morality, and international law’.
“The ICJ opinion also found that the U.N. Security Council, the General Assembly and all states have an obligation not to recognize the occupation as legal nor “render aid or assistance” toward maintaining Israel’s presence in the occupied territories.”
Reuters takes a look at how the Republican party has been trying to rebrand Trump and how long that lasted (about a half hour).
“For four nights at Donald Trump’s nominating convention in Milwaukee, a roster of speakers attempted to give one of the most divisive politicians in recent U.S. history a makeover, describing him as a loving and caring family man whose near-assassination at a rally on Saturday had changed him.
“Early in his speech on Thursday night, as he accepted his party’s presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, it seemed Trump had bought into the carefully orchestrated effort to repackage him as a humbler, unifying figure, more palatable to swing voters who will be crucial to winning the Nov. 5 election.
“In an age when our politics too often divide us, now is the time to remember that we are all fellow citizens,” Trump said.
“That new version of Trump lasted barely half an hour.
“Then the Trump more familiar to Americans – the bombastic thrower of insults who revels in demonizing his opponents – re-emerged, trampling over the message of unity so painstakingly choreographed by the Republican National Committee this week.
“In a rambling 92-minute address that broke the record for the longest convention speech in history, Trump called Democratic President Joe Biden the worst president in U.S. history and the former Democratic House Speaker “crazy Nancy Pelosi,” and accused Democrats of launching judicial witch hunts against him and creating a “planet of war.”
“The Democrat Party should immediately stop weaponizing the justice system and labeling their political opponent as an enemy of democracy, especially since that is not true,” Trump said.
“Using familiar hyperbolic and divisive language, he said illegal immigration to the United States was “the greatest invasion in history” and was leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans every year, though neither claim is supported by any data.
“He painted a dark picture of a crumbling America, a nation in decline, its cities crime-ridden and economically depressed, a staple image of his stump speech in which he presents himself as the country’s savior.
“We had been told this was going to be a different Trump, a softer side,” Mary Anna Mancuso, a Republican strategist and Trump critic, said afterward. “Trump’s speech was not about unifying the nation. It was the same Trump that we’ve seen and there was no difference.”
Here is a comparison between Mercator Projection country sizes and their actual sizes.
The Mercator Projection is a cylindrical map projection that was originally created to display accurate compass bearings for sea travel. It was presented by Gerardus Mercator in 1569 and still the most common form of world map.
