PICKS are stories from many sources, selected by our editors or recommended by our readers because they are important, surprising, troubling, enlightening, inspiring, or amusing. They appear on our site and in our daily newsletter. Please send suggested articles, videos, podcasts, etc. to picks@whowhatwhy.org.
Arizona Governor Signs Law Requiring Proof of Citizenship to Vote for President (Maria)
The author writes, “Arizona’s Republican governor [Doug Doucey] Wednesday signed a bill requiring voters to prove their citizenship to vote in a presidential election, drawing fierce opposition from voting rights advocates who say it risks affecting 200,000 people. The bill also requires anyone newly registering to vote to provide proof of their address. The state legislature’s own lawyers say much of the measure is unconstitutional, directly contradicts a recent US supreme court decision and is likely to be thrown out in court. Still, voting rights advocates worry the bill is an attempt to get back in front of the now more conservative Supreme Court.”
American Nun, 83, Kidnapped by Armed Men in Northern Burkina Faso (Carina)
The author writes, “Unidentified armed men kidnapped an 83-year-old American nun in northern Burkina Faso, the bishop of the local diocese said on Tuesday, in the latest in a series of abductions of Westerners in the West African country. The nun was named in a statement as Suellen Tennyson, of the Catholic congregation Marianites of Holy Cross. She had been serving in a community of nuns in the parish of Yalgo, part of the diocese of Kaya, where she was kidnapped on Monday night, since 2014, it said. Northern Burkina Faso is overrun by Islamist militants, some with links to al Qaeda and Islamic State. Several Westerners have been kidnapped in recent years.”
Sound on Mars Has a ‘Unique’ And Extremely Trippy Property, Recordings Reveal (Reader Steve)
The author writes, “Eerie audio recordings captured on Mars have revealed, for the first time, that there are two speeds of sound on the red planet, among other trippy insights about how acoustic waves travel on an alien world. NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, is the first mission ever to capture recordings of the Martian soundscape. Though some of Perseverance’s tracks have already dropped, scientists led by Sylvestre Maurice, an astrophysicist at the University of Toulouse, now ‘present the first characterization of Mars’ acoustic environment and pressure fluctuations in the audible range,’ featuring ‘pressure variations down to 1,000 times smaller scales than ever observed before,’ according to a study published on Friday in Nature.”
Putin the Poisoner Strikes Again (Sean)
From The Hill: “His old moniker was in the news again this week after the chemical or biological poisoning of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and other Ukrainian peace negotiators, who suddenly developed inexplicable physical symptoms. It was hardly Putin’s first suspected poisoning. He is heir to a centurylong tradition of poisonings, beginning with Stalin’s establishment of the notorious poison lab known as Laboratory One in downtown Moscow and massive biowar facilities at Saratov, still in use today. When direct execution or simple disappearance was politically undesirable or impractical, Stalin used secret poisons and bioweapons such as curare, potassium and anthrax to stage seemingly natural deaths.”
The First Country in the World Has Given Legal Rights to Individual Wild Animals (Mili)
From ScienceAlert: “While some countries struggle to uphold human rights, Ecuador has forged ahead and ruled wild animals possess distinct legal rights, including the right to exist. This 7-2 court ruling in February was a landmark interpretation of the country’s ‘rights of nature’ constitutional laws and elevated the legal status of nonhuman animals. ‘In America, the rights of nature sounds like a fringe idea, but people don’t realize how mainstream it is around the world,’ Kristen Stilt, an expert in animal law, told Inside Climate News.”
