Items of Interest - Doug Pierre

 Unearthing the Roots of Black Rebellion Unearthing the Roots of Black Rebellion NEW HAVEN, Conn. — For her first book, “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime,” the historian Elizabeth Hinton spent years digging through government archives, piecing together how bipartisan tough-on-crime federal legislation had funded an expansion of policing and set the stage for the mass incarceration we live with today. She had been pursuing a classic directive — follow the money. But shortly after she finished the book, a chance conversation set her archival antennae quivering in a different way. At a backyard barbecue, she met a political scientist who mentioned he had the archives of the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence, a short-lived enterprise founded in 1965. Soon she found herself sorting through box after box of newspaper clippings documenting the racial disturbances across the country in the years that followed. There were reports from the famous uprisings that rocked Watts, Ne

 As Stephanie Pappas reports for Live Science, any plutonium-244 that was baked into our planet’s crust during the formation of Earth would be long gone by now, implying that any plutonium-244 found today must have extraterrestrial origins.   #Plutonium-244 #Supernova https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-find-plutonium-made-outer-space-deep-sea-crust-180977739/?

  The young whale was sighted off the southern French coast this month. A scientist took a skin sample from Wally this month. SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS A walrus rested at a lifeboat station in Tenby, Wales, in March. A stranded juvenile minke whale in the River Thames last week. Gray Whales Were Thought to Be Extinct in the Atlantic. So How Did Wally End Up Off the Riviera? 6 minutes This feature is powered by text-to-speech technology. Want to see it on more articles? Give your feedback below or email  audiofeedback@wsj.com . Somewhere in the Mediterranean, a 26-foot-long gray whale is exploring harbors and inlets as it tries to find its way back out to the Atlantic after veering thousands of miles off course. Biologists, who have named the whale Wally, have been tracking its progress since it made its way into the waters separating southern Europe from North Africa in April. After first being spotted off Morocco, it passed Gibraltar and made its way as far as Italy before doubling back alo

  Vesuvius Victim Identified as Elite Roman Soldier Sent on Failed Rescue Mission A new analysis of a man killed by the eruption of  Mount Vesuvius  suggests that he was most likely an elite Roman soldier sent on an unsuccessful mission to rescue refugees from the natural disaster. As Claudio Lavanga reports for  NBC News , the man’s skeleton was one of about 300 found at a beach in the ancient town of  Herculaneum  in the 1980s. Like neighboring  Pompeii , Herculaneum was a popular seaside destination for ancient Romans. Both cities were destroyed by Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 A.D. “When I arrived at Herculaneum in 2017, I realized that a lot of research went into the skeletons, but nobody thought of analyzing the tools found next to it,”  Francesco Sirano , director of the archaeological site at Herculaneum, tells NBC News. “So my team and I took a closer look, and what we found was astonishing.” Unlike the rest of the skeletons found at the site, the man wore a leather belt and had a