The dream of flying has always fascinated humanity. In evolutionary history, the ability to fly has emerged independently only three times: in birds, pterosaurs, and, uniquely among mammals, in bats.

Bat wings are structurally similar to human hands, containing bones, blood vessels, nerves, and tendons. The key difference lies in a flexible skin membrane called the chiropatagium, which stretches between the elongated digits II to V. Additional membranes, the plagiopatagium and uropatagium, extend between the front and rear extremities, and between the legs, respectively.

Unlike bird or insect wings, the wings of bats can be moved like a hand during flight, making them particularly efficient and agile flying artists. In evolutionary terms, this adaptation has been a major success: with about 1,400 species, bats (order Chiroptera) are the second most diverse group of mammals after rodents. They are found all over the world, except in extreme deserts and polar regions.

How such remarkable capabilities like flight arise, along with the associated anatomical and functional changes, and how they are encoded in the genome has been a central question in biology since Darwin.

. . .

Where did Europe's distinct Uralic family of languages—which includes Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian—come from? New research puts their origins a lot farther east than many thought.

The analysis, led by a pair of doctoral candidates working with ancient DNA expert David Reich, integrated genetic data on 180 newly sequenced Siberians with more than 1,000 existing samples covering many continents and about 11,000 years of human history. The results, published in the journal Nature, identify the prehistoric progenitors of two important language families, including Uralic, spoken today by more than 25 million people.

The study finds the ancestors of present-day Uralic speakers living about 4,500 years ago in northeastern Siberia, within an area now known as Yakutia.

"Geographically, it's closer to Alaska or Japan than to Finland," said co-lead author Alexander Mee-Woong Kim '13, M.A. '22.

Linguists and archaeologists have been split on the origins of Uralic languages. The mainstream school of thought put their homeland in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, a range running north to south about 860 miles due east of Moscow. A minority view, noting convergences with Turkic and Mongolic languages, theorized a more easterly emergence.

. . .

Now that he’s got his authoritarian takeover of the US government well underway, Donald Trump is eagerly embarking on another step in the authoritarian playbook: very openly talking about how he’d like to rig upcoming elections to preserve the thin Republican majority in Congress. No subtlety about it at all. Trump made a call to Republican members of Texas’s congressional delegation yesterday to inform them that the Texas legislature plans to gerrymander the electoral map to create five new Republican-majority districts, and then before boarding Marine One to fly to Pittsburgh, he said Texas would definitely do what he wants.

REPORTER: Are you calling for a complete redrawing of the [Texas] congressional map?

TRUMP: No, just a simple redraw, we pick up five seats. But we have a couple of other states where we’ll pick up seats also.

This administration is so openly and habitually corrupt that we honestly can’t remember whether this is the first time a US president has so openly called for states to gerrymander district maps for partisan advantage. We’re pretty sure it is.

After the helicopter landed at Andrews, Trump was even more eager to share his plans, musing that in addition to redistricting Texas and a “couple other states,” it would actually be good to do the same in more states, like four others, “I’ll let you figure them out.” Isn’t he cute when he plays coy like that?

Asked if he worried that California and other blue states might follow suit and add new Democratic-majority seats, Trump said, without missing a beat, “Well, we’ll fight them, they’re so corrupt in California, you never know what’s gonna happen, but we’ve done pretty well in the courts.”

Redistricting to add Republican seats is just a thing he wants, so it’s OK. California doing that in Democrats’ favor would be corrupt. As far as we can tell, nobody pointed out that looks a teensy bit contradictory. Probably because that would be a very nasty question that only a very evil, stupid person from Fake News would ask.

. . .

It's been more than a year since I gave up on Google Search (I switched to Kagi.com and never looked back). I don't miss it. It had gotten terrible. It's gotten worse since, thanks to AI (of course):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google's a very bad company, of course. I mean, the company has lost three federal antitrust trials in the past 18 months. But that's not why I quit Google Search: I stopped searching with Google because Google Search suuuucked.

In the spring of 2024, it was clear that Google had lost the spam wars. Its search results were full of spammy garbage content whose creators' SEO was a million times better than their content. Every kind of Google Search result was bad, and results that contained the names of products were the worst, an endless cesspit of affiliate link-strewn puffery and scam sites.

It's not that the internet lacks for high-quality, reliable reviews. There are plenty of experts out there who subject a wide range of products to careful assessment, laboratory tests, and extensive comparisons. The sites where these reviews appear are instantly recognizable, and it's a great relief to find them.

One such site is Housefresh.com, whose proprietor, Giselle Navarro, runs a team that produces extremely detailed, objective, high-quality reviews of air purifiers. This is an important product category: if you're someone with bad allergies or an immunocompromising condition, finding the right air purifier can exert enormous influence on your health outcomes.

This month, Housefresh released its latest report on Google's enshittification, this time with an emphasis on the "AI Overviews" that now surmount every search results page. Google has widely touted these as the future of search, a way to bypass the ad-strewn, popup-obscured, AI-sloppified (!) pages that it is seemingly powerless to filter out of its search corpus:
https://housefresh.com/beware-of-the-google-ai-salesman/

. . .

Is there anything more Trump-era Republican than fake-rich living beyond one’s means? And cheating on your wife, allegedly beating your mistress and lying about your finances and qualifications? Meet Florida Rep. Cory Mills, who is one messy pile of curb furniture! He’s getting evicted from the soon-to-be-divorced-dad pad he was sharing with his sidepiece because he owes his landlord more than $85,000 in unpaid rent, on a penthouse that’s nearly $21,000 a month!

(If you live outside DC or New York or another large city, please understand that $21K per month is very expensive anywhere.)

How befitting for an arms-maker with shady finances. (You know, in case you were curious how he got approved for $21K per month on his $174,000 congressional salary.) If you’re wondering what the soon-to-be-available place looks like, TPM’s Josh Marshall found a link to a similar, slightly smaller penthouse in the complex. Oligarch chic!

The eviction scoop and receipts were picked up by former Daily Beast reporter Roger Sollenberger and dropped on X, and Mills quickly X’d back the sorriest of excuses for not playing his bills:
Roger, I know facts are unusual and unfamiliar thing for you, but here’s just the past two months where you can see I’m repeatedly asking for payment links and again as I tried with management today, it failed to process. “Error code 108 typically indicates an issue with the Windows Installer Service, often meaning another installation is already running. It can also be related to bank connectivity problems in financial software” Facts are a finicky thing but wouldn’t expect you to be anything other than a biased hack!

Sure, guy, the multibillion-dollar management company Bozzuto left its website unable to collect rent from tenants for months on end and refused to accept payment in any other way. You know landlords, how they’re always so lackadaisical about collecting their money! (Especially when the rent is $21K.)

. . .

The Trump administration has declared — without ever informing the American people, because what part of authoritarianism didn’t you understand? — that effective immediately, immigrants who came to the US without papers no longer have the right to a bond hearing, no matter how long they’ve been in the US. The new policy was revealed yesterday in reporting by the Washington Post (gift link). Immigration lawyers said the new policy applies to millions of people, including folks who have been here for decades and have established families, own homes and businesses, and who haven’t broken any laws other than crossing the border without authorization (remember, kids, that’s a misdemeanor on the first offense).

The administration is changing how it interprets a 1996 law that allowed “mandatory detention” of certain criminal aliens like murderers and other violent criminals, keeping them in detention until their deportation cases were completed. But in a July 8 memo, Todd Lyons, (acting) director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) informed the agency that any immigrants who ever entered the country illegally will now be locked up “for the duration of their removal proceedings.” Because the immigration system is horribly backlogged, that can take months or years.

It’s a huge change in immigration cases, as the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick points out, because

The default rule, dating back a century, has been that an undocumented immigrant living here is eligible for bond if not a flight risk or a danger.

That rule was changed in ‘96 for people with criminal records. Now the Trump admin is arguing it also eliminated bond for those who entered illegally.

Well, now we know what ICE plans to do with the $45 billion in new funding the Big Ugly Bill gave it to expand its prison capacity. As Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Mother Jones even before the new ICE policy was announced, the vast expansion of prison funding will “drastically change the landscape. A vast infrastructure of detention will be built, and actually has already started, even before this bill was signed.”

Congratulations, America! We’ll finally have our very own Gulag Archipelago! Just think of the great literature that may eventually be written by some of the survivors!

. . .

Reporting Highlights

Chinese Tech Support: Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel.

Skills Gap: Digital escorts often lack the technical expertise to police foreign engineers with far more advanced skills, leaving highly sensitive data vulnerable to hacking.

Ignored Warnings: Various people involved in the work told ProPublica that they warned Microsoft that the arrangement is inherently risky, but the company launched and expanded it anyway.

. . .

John Sherman, who was chief information officer for the Department of Defense during the Biden administration, said he was surprised and concerned to learn of ProPublica’s findings. “I probably should have known about this,” he said. He told the news organization that the situation warrants a “thorough review by DISA, Cyber Command and other stakeholders that are involved in this.”

. . .

or 40 cruel and bloody months, Ukraine has fought the Russian invader. Since February 2022, when Moscow’s full-scale, countrywide onslaught began, its people have faced relentless, devastating attacks. Tens of thousands have been killed or wounded, millions have lost their homes. Ukraine’s industries, shops, schools, hospitals and power stations burn, its fertile farmlands are laid waste. Its children are orphaned, traumatised or abducted. Despite repeated appeals, the world has failed to stop the carnage. And yet Ukraine, outnumbered and outgunned, has continued to fight back.

Ukrainian heroism amid horror has become so familiar, it’s almost taken for granted. But as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, escalates the war, raining nightly terror on Kyiv and other cities using record waves of armed drones, as US support and peace efforts falter, and as Ukraine’s overstretched frontline soldiers face exhaustion, such complacency looks increasingly misplaced. A no longer hypothetical question becomes ever more real and urgent: what if Ukraine falls?

Answer: Ukraine’s collapse, if it happens, would amount to an epic western strategic failure matching or exceeding the Afghanistan and Iraq calamities. The negative ramifications for Europe, Britain, the transatlantic alliance and international law are truly daunting. That thought alone should concentrate minds.

It has been evident since the dying days of 2023, when its counteroffensive stalled, that Ukraine is not winning. For most of this year, Russian forces have inexorably inched forward in Donetsk and other eastern killing grounds, regardless of cost. Estimated Russian casualties recently surpassed 1 million, dead and wounded. Still they keep coming. While there has been no big Russian breakthrough, for Ukraine’s pinned-down, under-supplied defenders the war is now a daily existential struggle. That they manage to keep going at all is astonishing.

. . .

Two outcomes now seem most probable: a stalemated forever war, or Ukraine’s collapse. Defeat for Ukraine and a settlement on Putin’s hegemonic terms would be a defeat for the west as a whole – a strategic failure presaging an era of permanent, widening conflict across all of Europe. For Russians, too, neither outcome would constitute lasting victory. Greater efforts are needed to convince Russia’s politicians and public that this war, so costly for their country in lives and treasure, can be ended through negotiation, that legitimate security concerns will be addressed, that the alternatives are far worse.

But first, they must give him up. The chief architect of this horror, the principal author of Russia’s disgrace, must be defanged, deposed and delivered to international justice. Putin, not Ukraine, must fall.

On July 5, the day after the Texas floods hit, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) received 3,027 calls from survivors and answered 3,018 of them, about 99.7%, according to Maxine Joselow of the New York Times. But that day, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did not renew the contracts for four call center companies that answered those calls. The staff at the centers were fired. The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or about 35.8%. On Monday, July 7, FEMA received 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, around 15.9%.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said: “When a natural disaster strikes, phone calls surge, and wait times can subsequently increase. Despite this expected influx, FEMA’s disaster call center responded to every caller swiftly and efficiently, ensuring no one was left without assistance.”

Marcy Wheeler of EmptyWheel notes that one reason Noem has been cutting so ferociously at FEMA is because she has run through the money Congress allocated for HHS with her single-minded focus on immigration.

In May, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) called out Noem’s expenditure of $200 million on an ad campaign pushing Trump’s agenda and $21 million to transport about 400 migrants to Guantanamo Bay only to have many of them transferred back out. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told Noem: “You are spending like you don’t have a budget…. You're on track to trigger the Anti-Deficiency Act. That means you are going to spend more money than you have been allocated by Congress. This is a rare occurrence, and it is wildly illegal. Your agency will be broke by July, over two months before the end of the fiscal year. You may not think that Congress has provided enough money to ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], but the Constitution and the federal law does not allow you to spend more money than you've been given, or to invent money. And this obsession with spending at the border…has left the country unprotected elsewhere.

. . .

A poll released Friday makes it clear that the American people do not support such a vision and did not, in fact, expect a Trump administration to deport undocumented immigrants who have no criminal record and have lived in the U.S. for years. A Gallup poll released yesterday shows that the administration’s draconian policies toward immigrants have created a backlash. A record 79% of adults say immigration is good for the country, with only 17% seeing it as bad. That change has been driven primarily by a shift in Republicans, 64% of whom now agree that immigrants are good for the country, up from their low of under 40%. The percentage of American adults who say immigration should be reduced has dropped to 30%, down from 55% in 2024.

. . .

Is a masked “officer” bumping an observer and accusing said observer of assaulting a federal officer the ICE equivalent of using a “drop gun” or a “throw-down gun” to frame a suspect? Asking for the current and future accused.

TNR:

Grandmother Barbara Stone says she was documenting the detention of asylum-seekers with the group “Detention Resistance” at San Diego’s immigration court when she was baselessly accused of pushing an officer. Multiple masked agents then pursued Stone, grabbed and handcuffed her (leaving bruises), confiscated her phone and purse, and detained her for over eight hours, she says.

Once Stone was released, ICE returned her bag but kept possession of her phone. Why? Stone says an ICE agent compared the situation to “a drug bust where they keep a drug dealer’s phone because I had used it in the crime.”

But the only “crime” of which Stone says she’s guilty is documenting immigration enforcement. If this is true, the episode would track with other apparent attempts by ICE agents to avoid accountability of late, for instance, by wearing masks so they can conduct raids and arrests anonymously.

Maybe observers should carry a throw-down ham sandwich to these ICE raids. Blame the sandwich for any inadvertent contact.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?