Happy Friday!
OVECHKIN PREACHES PEACE AND LOVE FROM BEHIND THE GUY PROMISING NO MERCY
Alex Ovechkin turned 41 on Thursday and spent his birthday at Capitals media day explaining why he is standing in a television ad for United Russia, Vladimir Putin's party, directly behind Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov while Lavrov warns that anyone who comes at Russia "with a sword" should "expect no mercy." Ovechkin's explanation was that he's Russian, he supports his country, they asked him, he said yes, "so it's as simple as that." He also said he's for peace and love, which is an odd thing to announce from the back row of that particular commercial. He doesn't say a word in the ad. He just stands there, menacingly. The supporting cast does not help. Soviet hockey legend Viacheslav Fetisov is in it, and so is RT editor in chief Margarita Simonyan. Lavrov, the one actually talking, is sanctioned by the US, UK, EU and Canada, and the US Treasury named him one of the architects of the war. The voting runs September 18 to 20, with United Russia plus nine other parties that all back Putin's policies, and the only antiwar party barred from the ballot. Rep. Joe Wilson wrote Gary Bettman and Ted Leonsis calling it "incredibly alarming" and asked the league to clarify what rules, if any, cover active players appearing in propaganda for dictatorial parties. Dominik Hasek called it support for the war. Latvia declared Ovechkin persona non grata and barred him from entering. The NHL's most recent position dates to 2022, when it said Russian players compete for their clubs and not for Russia. The Capitals called him a pillar of the community and pivoted to the season.
NEW CAT DLC DROPS FOR FIRST TIME IN A CENTURY
Nobody had added a new living cat species to the books in more than 100 years. Then a man in Bolivia picked up a kitten on a road near the forest, kept it in his home for about a year, and handed it over to the Senda Verde refuge, which called biologist Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz in 2016 to look at their "weird cat." She figured it was a known tiger cat. The genome disagreed. Meet Leopardus tilcayo, described Thursday in Current Biology. National Geographic measured the captive male at roughly three pounds and about 18 inches of body before the tail, spotted like a leopard that got shrunk in the wash and smaller than whatever is currently shedding on your couch. The DNA says it split off from the rest of the Leopardus crowd around 1.4 million years ago, and the same analysis carved South America's tiger cats into five separate species plus a new Peruvian subspecies. We clocked all of it because one cat at a refuge near La Paz looked slightly off. The researchers named it after tilcayo, the word local people were already using. Even though we found the new species, we don't know much about them, just one known individual in protective captivity, a ten-year-old male the staff call Tigrino, and almost nothing known about how the species actually lives in the wild. Co-author Tadeu de Oliveira says all the tiger cats' habitats are vanishing fast.
HOUTHIS SAY THEY SHOT DOWN A SAUDI F-15 WITH A HOMEMADE MISSILE
The Houthis posted video Wednesday of what they say is a Saudi F-15 they knocked out of the sky over Marib. Their statement says the US-built jet was downed by a locally manufactured surface-to-air missile while it was running operations over Marib Governorate. The clip has an animated missile hitting a jet, fighters picking through desert wreckage, and a tailfin bearing a Saudi flag and the number 5539 hoisted up for the camera. CNN geolocated the crash site to Marib, after the BBC got there first. CNN's military analyst Cedric Leighton, a retired US Air Force colonel, said the tail markings were "consistent" with Saudi F-15SA jets. Riyadh's response has been a wall of nothing. Saudi authorities and the Arab Coalition leadership have not confirmed or refuted the shootdown. Nobody has said what happened to the two aircrew, and the Houthis never mentioned them. If it holds up, it would be only the second time hostile fire has brought down one of these jets. The jet is the sideshow. Marib is the last anti-Houthi stronghold in northern Yemen and sits on the country's biggest oil and gas fields. Last week the Houthis grabbed a Red Sea port city and an island near the waterway that had been serving as the backup route for Saudi oil exports. Houthi spokesman Yahya Saree also claims the Saudis ran 450 strikes. The Saudis, again, say nothing.
BLIND MAN WITH NO LICENCE DRUNK-DROVE 150 MILES BY FOLLOWING TAILLIGHTS
Anthony Hall, 50, of Huddersfield, has been registered blind for two years and has never held a driving licence. On 29 June he took his partner's Vauxhall Meriva without asking, after the two of them shared four bottles of wine, and pointed it north. Police stopped him on the M6 near Carlisle at 1.45am, roughly 150 miles later. Asked how he had got that far, he told officers he followed the tail lights of lorries. Every mile of that trip required somebody else to not notice. He stopped for fuel somewhere along the route and a petrol station attendant filled the car up for him. Police got a tip that there was a driver on the M6 who was drunk and also blind, which is a hell of a thing to hear over the radio at one in the morning. He blew 50 micrograms at the roadside and 46 at the station against a limit of 35, and the wine is maybe the fourth most alarming detail here. The court heard he had suffered a breakdown, was running from money and family problems, and wanted to reach Scotland. Nobody was hurt, which the court called miraculous. Kirklees magistrates handed him 36 weeks suspended for 18 months and banned him from driving for a year. A driving ban. For a man with no sight and no licence, who is therefore back in the clear next autumn.
THOSE 'DEMENTIA-PROOF' AMAZON COMMUNITIES ACTUALLY GET DEMENTIA AT OUR RATE
In 2022 the Tsimané and Mosetén walked into international headlines with what looked like the best brains on the planet. Researchers counted five dementia cases among 435 Tsimané and one among 169 Mosetén aged 60 and over, and lead author Margaret Gatz said something about the pre-industrial subsistence lifestyle appeared to be protecting them. Every longevity podcast in America took a victory lap on behalf of hunting, fishing and walking a lot. Then the same team went back. They followed 730 adults who had no dementia at their first assessment and revisited them nearly five years later, and logged 22 new cases at 7.40 per 1,000 person-years, with incidence similar to Western populations before age 80. "The surprising finding was that there weren't big differences in dementia incidence," Gatz said. Prevalence stayed under 2% partly because dementia there came with more than six times the mortality. Limited medical care makes treatable infections and other acute illnesses more deadly. It also isn't the Alzheimer's you're picturing. Blood work linked cases to neurofilament light chain, a general marker of neurodegeneration, and not to amyloid or phosphorylated tau, and many affected people had more trouble with attention, reasoning and managing tasks than with memory. The heart-healthy theory took a hit too, since research in these communities hasn't found that better metabolic health means lower dementia risk. The authors caution that 22 cases are too few to explain everything, and new-case rates were still modestly lower than in many US and European studies, so survival isn't the whole answer either.
|
Mr. Mug presents
Get on the | |||
| |||
|
Then be the dude
who sets it. Earn a slot. Set the day's puzzle. Your clues, your number, your name on it. Be the dude → |
