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India Doubled Its Tiger Population in a Decade Though Conservation: Study (Maria)
The author writes, “India doubled its tiger population in a little over a decade by protecting the big cats from poaching and habitat loss, ensuring they have enough prey, reducing human-wildlife conflict, and increasing communities’ living standards near tiger areas, a study published Thursday found. The number of tigers grew from an estimated 1,706 tigers in 2010 to around 3,682 in 2022, according to estimates by the National Tiger Conservation Authority, making India home to roughly 75% of the global tiger population.”
What To Know About Guantánamo Bay, the Base Where Trump Will Send ‘Criminal Aliens’ (Reader Steve)
The author writes, “President Donald Trump, who made the deportation of immigrants a central part of his campaign and presidency, said Wednesday that the U.S. will use a detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to hold tens of thousands of the ‘worst criminal aliens.’ … He later signed a presidential memorandum and said he’d direct federal officials to get facilities ready to receive criminal immigrants in the US illegally. Border czar Tom Homan said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would run the facility. Still, details of the plan weren’t immediately clear. Here’s a look at the U.S. naval base, widely known as ‘Gitmo,’ and its history.”
Trump Rescinds Biden’s Census Order, Clearing a Path for Reshaping Election Maps (Dana)
The author writes, “Among the dozens of Biden-era executive orders that President Trump revoked [last week] was one that had reversed the first Trump administration’s unprecedented policy of altering a key set of census results. Since the first U.S. census in 1790, no resident has ever been omitted from those numbers because of immigration status. And after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment has called for the population counts that determine each state’s share of U.S. House seats and Electoral College votes to include the ‘whole number of persons in each state.’ … Biden’s order also effectively ended a Trump administration-initiated project at the Census Bureau to produce neighborhood block-level citizenship data using government records. That data, a GOP redistricting strategist once concluded, could be ‘advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites’ when voting districts are redrawn.”
Declassified CIA Guide to Sabotaging Fascism Is Suddenly Viral (DonkeyHotey)
From 404 Media: “A declassified World War II-era government guide to ‘simple sabotage’ is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called Simple Sabotage Field Manual, was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and ‘describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly.’”
Elon Musk Teams Up With Boeing to Rush Production of New Air Force One (Sean)
The author writes, “After leaving the federal government’s operations in shambles and causing major confusion over healthcare funding, SpaceX CEO and White House advisor Elon Musk has a new priority: the delivery of a pair of luxurious Boeing 747s, so he and president Donald Trump can jet around in style. And in an unusual twist, Musk is talking to longtime space industry competitor Boeing to speed up the delivery of the two Air Force One passenger jets.”
The Trump Pardons That Will Haunt America (Reader Jim)
From Slate: “On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed dozens of executive orders that sought to reach into nearly every corner of America life. Yet that was overshadowed by Trump’s unprecedented, sweeping pardons and commutations for nearly all of the roughly 1,500 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. … To help understand the true scope of Trump’s action, on Tuesday I spoke with Jacob Ware … [whose] work examines the deep roots of far-right extremism and the importance of the sedition charges that followed Jan. 6 in sending a message of accountability in America. Now, with Trump’s pardons reversing much of that, I asked Ware how he sees this moment. He had a simple response: ‘We’re in unprecedented territory.’”
The Songs of Ancient Trees (Laura)
From Sierra: “Over the past century, the biodiversity of apple trees has declined sharply in the United States. Monoculture orchards have erased the mature forested orchards that once served as habitat for dozens of bird species such as bluebirds, northern flickers, and scarlet tanagers. There once were some 16,000 named apple varieties in the US alone. We’ve now lost more than half of those varieties, with only 3,000 remaining. As a naturalist, I have been researching apple biodiversity for several years, and I find it especially gratifying when this pathway leads me to our rich, and sometimes forgotten, history of apple growing. To rediscover some of that history, I looked to one of the earliest known places where apples were grown in North America — the Manzano Mountains.”
