MicroWave

Ryan Wesley Routh, the suspected gunman involved in an apparent assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump at the Trump International Golf Club in Florida on Sunday, was charged with possession of a weapon of mass destruction over 20 years ago.

“I figured he was either dead or in prison by now,” Tracy Fulk, the charging officer in the case, tells WIRED. “I had no clue that he had moved on and was continuing his escapades.”

According to court records from the Guilford District Court in North Carolina obtained by WIRED, Routh was arrested by the Greensboro Police Department on December 16, 2002.

Local reporting from Greensboro News and Record in 2002 states that Routh was pulled over by police during a traffic stop. Routh then drove to the business United Roofing, where he proceeded to barricade himself for three hours, the police said at the time.

…

Routh was charged with possession of a fully automatic machine gun, referred to in court filings as a weapon of mass destruction. He was also charged with carrying a concealed weapon, as well as driving without a valid license and resisting, delaying, and obstructing law enforcement, according to Greensboro News and Record.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Ukraine should be allowed to strike deep inside Russia, despite Moscow threatening that this would draw Canada and its allies into direct war.

"Canada fully supports Ukraine using long-range weaponry to prevent and interdict Russia's continued ability to degrade Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, and mostly to kill innocent civilians in their unjust war," Trudeau told reporters at a news conference in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Que., on Friday.

The claimed acquisition by Yemen’s Houthi rebels of hypersonic missiles capable of penetrating Israeli air defences threatens to further heighten Middle East tensions, as Saudi Arabia calls for more than “pinprick bombings” to constrain the supply of weapons to the group.

Saudi Arabia, which supports the Yemen government opposing the Houthis, believes Iran has been arming the group, including with the weapons used in the attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea. Those attacks have led to a halving of the traffic on the Red Sea route, pushing up the costs of maritime transport and damaging the Egyptian economy through disruption to the Suez canal.

Ukrainian president says Brasília-Beijing initiative shows “lack of respect” toward Kyiv’s position.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Brazil of being pro-Russia in the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine and lambasted a joint peace proposal drawn up by Brasília and Beijing.

“The Chinese-Brazilian proposal is also destructive, it’s just a political statement,” Zelenskyy said during an interview with Brazilian news site Metrópoles on Wednesday evening.

Brazil and China signed a joint statement in May calling for peace talks involving both Russia and Ukraine. However, according to the Ukrainian president, the two countries consulted Moscow but not Kyiv.

“We are not stupid,” Zelenskyy said during the interview. “How can you offer ‘here is our initiative’ without asking anything from us?” He added, “This is a lack of respect toward Ukraine.”

A tsunami stemming from a landslide in a Greenland fjord, caused by melting ice, was behind a surprising seismic event last year that shook the earth for nine days, a researcher told AFP on Friday.

According to a report recently published in the scientific journal Science, tremors that were registered in September 2023 originated from the massive wave rocking back and forth in the Dickson fjord in Greenland's remote east.

"The completely unique thing about this event is how long the seismic signal lasted and how constant the frequency was," one of the authors of the report, Kristian Svennevig, from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, told AFP.

"Other landslides and tsunamis have produced seismic signals but only for a couple of hours and very locally. This one was observed globally all the way to the Antarctic," he said.

Just about every time J.D. Vance — the most unpopular vice presidential nominee in American history — opens his mouth, he ignites a firestorm of criticism and likely shaves another point off the Republican presidential ticket’s polling numbers.

On Sunday, in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Vance admitted that he and Donald Trump made up a baseless and racist story about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually has to pay attention to the suffering of American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” said Vance, a U.S. Senator representing Ohio.

Ironically, Vance’s attempt to point out imagined “suffering” has led to actual suffering by his own constituents.

The Supreme Court was hit by a flurry of damaging new leaks Sunday as a series of confidential memos written by the chief justice were revealed by The New York Times.

The court’s Chief Justice John Roberts was clear to his fellow justices in February: He wanted the court to take up a case weighing Donald Trump’s right to presidential immunity—and he seemed inclined to protect the former president.

“I think it likely that we will view the separation of powers analysis differently,” Roberts wrote to his Supreme Court peers, according to a private memo obtained by the *Times. *He was referencing the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to allow the case to move forward.

Roberts took an unusual level of involvement in this and other cases that ultimately benefited Trump, according to the Times— his handling of the cases surprised even some other justices on the high court, across ideological lines. As president, Trump appointed three of the members of its current conservative supermajority.

Researchers are finding heat-related illnesses can also contribute to heart disease and cognitive impairment

At a dialysis center in Atlanta, Lauren Kasper tended to patients resting in hospital beds, some too sick to be transferred to a chair. Many arrived in wheelchairs or walked with canes, their bodies weakened from kidney disease.

As she hooked them up to dialysis machines, Kasper, a nurse practitioner, was struck by how young many of her patients were.

“The majority of the patients that you would see in a typical outpatient center are 60-plus,” she said. “With these patients, some of them were in their 20s and their 30s, 40s. The fact that they were a really significant portion of the population was really startling.”

In 2022, Kasper co-authored a study on the work histories of these patients. Many had labored in landscaping, roofing or agriculture, where they were exposed to harsh chemicals and extreme heat. The study suggested that, in a warming climate, people working in heat-stressed environments may be at even greater risk of kidney disease.

It is one of the least understood processes in nature. How do two very different species learn to live with each other and create a bond, known as symbiosis, which can give them a powerful evolutionary advantage?

Coral reefs are the most spectacular manifestations of symbiosis – and understanding the mechanics of this mutual endeavour has become an urgent task as global warming has triggered the widespread collapse of reefs across the planet.

In a bid to halt this destruction, an international group of researchers led by the Wellcome Sanger Institute is working together on the Aquatic Symbiosis Genomics (ASG) project. Powerful DNA sequencers are now unravelling the genetic secrets of coral, data that could be vital in saving the world’s reefs, and understanding the mysterious processes that drive symbiosis.