ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 271

At Prayer Breakfast, Guests Seek Access to a Different Higher Power

By Kenneth P. Vogel and Elizabeth Dias

WASHINGTON — With a lineup of prayer meetings, humanitarian forums and religious panels, the National Prayer Breakfast has long brought together people from all over the world for an agenda built around the teachings of Jesus.

But there on the guest list in recent years was Maria Butina, looking to meet high-level American officials and advance the interests of the Russian state, and Yulia Tymoshenko, a Ukranian opposition leader, seeking a few minutes with President Trump to burnish her credentials as a presidential prospect back home.

Their presence at the breakfast illuminates the way the annual event has become an international influence-peddling bazaar, where foreign dignitaries, religious leaders, diplomats and lobbyists jockey for access to the highest reaches of American power.

The subculture around the breakfast was thrust into the spotlight last week with the indictment of Ms. Butina, who was charged with conspiring to act as a Russian agent. Her goals, prosecutors said, included gaining access to the breakfast “to establish a back channel of communication” between influential Russians and Americans “to promote the political interests of the Russian Federation.”

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Surrendering to Rising Seas

By Jen Schwartz

MONIQUE COLEMAN’S BASEMENT was still wet with saltwater when the rallying began. Just days after Superstorm Sandy churned into the mid-Atlantic region, pushing a record-breaking surge into the country’s most densely populated corridor, the governor of New Jersey promised to put the sand back on the beaches.

The “build it back stronger” sentiment never resonated with Coleman, who lived not on the state’s iconic barrier islands but in a suburban tidal floodplain bisected by 12 lanes of interstate highway. Sandy was being billed as an unusual “Frankenstorm,” a one-in-500-year hurricane that also dropped feet of snow. But for Coleman and many residents of the Watson-Crampton neighborhood in Woodbridge Township, the disaster marked the third time their houses had been inundated by floodwaters in just three years. Taxed by the repetitive assault of hydrodynamic pressure, some foundations had collapsed.

As evacuees returned home for another round of sump pumps and mold, Coleman considered her options. Woodbridge sits in the pinched waist of New Jersey, where a network of rivers and creeks drain to the Raritan Bay and then to the Atlantic Ocean. She heard that the Army Corps of Engineers wouldn’t be coming to build a berm or tide gate; the area had recently been evaluated, and such costly protections seemed unlikely. Spurred by previous storms, Coleman had already learned a bit about the ecological history of her nearly 350-year-old township. She discovered that parts of her neighborhood, like many chunks of this region, were developed atop low-lying wetlands, which had been elevated with poorly draining “fill” back around the early 20th century. As Coleman researched more deeply, a bigger picture emerged. “I started to realize that, in a sense, we were victims of a system because we were living in a neighborhood that should have never been built,” she says.

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Total Lunar Eclipse Today: How to See the ‘Blood Moon’ Online

By Meghan Bartels

The total lunar eclipse today (July 27) won’t be visible for people across North America, and bad weather could threaten even the geographically lucky — but in the digital age, no avid skywatcher is ever shut out.

Astronomy lovers from across the eclipse zone will be livestreaming their views, so if you are not able to catch the event live, you’ll have plenty of options, and we’ll pick one to share at Space.com.

Slooh will turn its online telescope to the lunar eclipse for a massive 6-hour moon-fest, with coverage starting at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) and ending at 7:30 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT). The webcast will include a team of experts discussing the science and stories behind lunar eclipses in general and this long one specifically. [Here’s How Friday’s Superlong Lunar Eclipse Works]

The Virtual Telescope Project will also be broadcasting its view of the eclipse — and Mars in opposition — from the Palatine Hill of Rome. This livestream will appeal to history lovers, with the ancient Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum dominating the skyline. The broadcast will start at 2:30 p.m. EDT (1830 GMT).

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Pompeo issues declaration calling for world governments to prioritize religious freedom

By Max Greenwood

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rolled out a document on Thursday urging governments around the world to prioritize religious freedom, further elevating an issue that the Trump administration has pushed since last year.

The Potomac Declaration and an accompanying plan of action were released at the inaugural Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom conference in Washington, D.C.

The declaration states that “religious freedom is a far-reaching, universal, and profound human right that all peoples and nations of good will must defend around the globe.”

Pomepo touted it as an effort to make good on President Trump‘s promise to make religious freedom a “key priority” of his foreign policy.

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18 Secular Groups Sign Letter Opposing Confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to SCOTUS

By Hemant Mehta

A coalition of 18 secular organizations have signed onto a letter opposing the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, because his “speeches and writings reveal a level of biased, ideological fervor” that shouldn’t be rewarded with a lifetime appointment.

The letter was sent to Sen. Chuck Grassley and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

While there are many reasons to oppose his confirmation, like his almost certain vote against legal abortions, this letter focuses on Kavanaugh’s beliefs that religion always trumps non-religion even during secular events.

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Climate Change Strengthens Earth’s ‘Heartbeat’ — and That’s Bad News

By Chelsea Gohd

It’s no secret that human activity is changing the climate, and one new study shows how our influence is seriously affecting Earth’s seasons and atmosphere.

Climate change is much more than rising temperatures and melting ice. In a new study, scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and five otherorganizations show that human action significantly affects the seasonal temperature cycle in the troposphere, or lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere — the layer that we live in where weather occurs.

These researchers used what is known as a “fingerprint” technique, in which they separated human influence from natural influence on climate. This allowed them to isolate human contributions and assess the specific effects of our species. And, while many fingerprint studies explore climate patterns over years and decades, this work shows how humans influence the changing seasons.

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Star’s black hole encounter puts Einstein’s theory of gravity to the test

By Daniel Clery

For more than 20 years, a team of astronomers has tracked a single star whipping around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy at up to 25 million kilometers per hour, or 3% of the speed of light. Now, the team says that the close encounter has put Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity to its most rigorous test yet for massive objects, with the light from the star stretched in a way not prescribed by Newtonian gravity. In a study announced today, the team says it has detected a distinctive indicator of Einstein’s general theory of relativity called “gravitational redshift,” in which the star’s light loses energy because of the black hole’s intense gravity.

“It’s really exciting. This is such an amazing observation,” says astronomer Andrea Ghez of the University of California, Los Angeles, who heads a rival group that is also tracking the star. “This is a direct test [of relativity] that we’ve both been preparing for for years.”

The star, called S2, is unremarkable apart from a highly elliptical orbit that takes it within 20 billion kilometers, or 17 light hours, of the Milky Way’s central black hole—closer than any other known star. A team led by Reinhard Genzel at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany, has been tracking S2 since the 1990s, first with the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) 3.6-meter New Technology Telescope in Chile and later with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), made up of four 8-meter instruments. Ghez’s team at UCLA also began observing the star around the same time with the twin 10-meter Keck telescopes in Hawaii.

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Stop the ‘weaponization’ of religion in Pakistani politics

By Johnnie Moore and Gayle Manchin

(RNS) — This week, as hundreds of religious leaders, nonprofit heads and government officials gather in Washington for the State Department’s first-ever ministerial on religious freedom, an election about to take place in Pakistan shows why the cause of religious freedom is as important as it has ever been in modern history.

For Pakistan’s Christians and minority Ahmadi Muslims, the run-up to Wednesday’s (July 25) vote has been terrifying. New hard-line Islamist political parties, such as the Allah-o-Akbar Tehreek and the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, have risen, focusing on denigrating the Ahmadis.

Last November, the TLP organized a violent protest that called for Ahmadi Muslims to be removed from high positions in Pakistani society, and demanded that a list be created of all Ahmadi Muslims working in the government. Ahmadis have long been subject to targeted killings, bomb attacks and vigilante violence, and the prospect of being publicly identified cast an even darker shadow over the community’s future.

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Atheist Groups Urge Senate to Reject Anti-Gay Adoption Amendment in House Bill

By Hemant Mehta

As we posted about last week, the House Appropriations Committee recently voted on an amendment, introduced by Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL), to withhold funds from any state requiring taxpayer-funded adoption agencies to serve all clients.

It’s essentially a punishment for any state that doesn’t support faith-based adoption agencies that discriminate against gay clients.

In theory, those agencies could also discriminate against interfaith couples, single parents, divorced people, or [insert your reason here].

This is nothing more than taxpayer-funded bigotry.

Now a coalition of atheist organizations has written a letter to the senators in charge of the Senate Committee on Appropriations. Their version of the bill doesn’t include this amendment, and the groups want to make sure that’s the case when everyone votes on the final version of the bill.

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174-million-year-old ‘Amazing Dragon’ dinosaur discovered in China

By Mike Wehner

Ferocious carnivores like the Tyrannosaurus tend to take top billing when it comes to dinosaur pop culture, but the colossal plant-eaters known as sauropods are just as worthy of acclaim. This group of long-necked beasts include the brachiosaurus, brontosaurus, apatosaurus, and diplodocus as well as many others, and paleontologists in China are now ready to add another new species to the list.

The creature’s long-still bones were discovered in a handful of different fossil sites in China, and with as many as 10 partial skeletons to draw from, researchers have been able to classify it as a new species. It has been named Lingwulong shenqui, which roughly translates to “the amazing dragon of Lingwu.”

The dinosaur wasn’t quite as large as others in the sauropod group, but it still would have been an impressive creature to see in person. It is thought to have measured between 35 and 55 feet in length, and like most sauropods it would have spent the majority of its days traveling in small groups and munching on vegetation.

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