The Wonks Who Sold America On South Sudan

(LONDON) — Two men accused of cutting down the majestic Sycamore Gap tree concealed their faces from cameras as they arrived at court Wednesday but inside the courtroom they couldn’t hide from the cost of the damage they allegedly caused. A prosecutor said the value of the roughly 150-year-old beloved tree that was toppled onto Hadrian’s Wall in northern England last year exceeded 620,000 pounds ($785,000). [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “This is a case that will be instantly recognizable to you, indeed anyone hearing the charges read out,” prosecutor Rebecca Brown said in Newcastle Magistrates’ Court.

(DALLAS) — Scientists once thought of dinosaurs as sluggish, cold-blooded creatures. Then research suggested that some could control their body temperature, but when and how that shift came about remained a mystery. Now, a new study estimates that the first warm-blooded dinosaurs may have roamed the Earth about 180 million years ago, about halfway through the creatures’ time on the planet. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Warm-blooded creatures — including birds, who are descended from dinosaurs, and humans — keep their body temperature constant whether the world around them runs cold or hot.

New York City will host its very first National Urban Rat Summit this fall, Mayor Eric Adams announced Wednesday. The summit will invite experts like academic researchers and municipal pest control managers to come together and share strategies on rodent mitigation and “advance the science of urban rat management,” the city said in a press release.

The news that local North Carolina investigators tapped the U. S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI while looking into the death of Mica Miller, a 30-year-old woman married to South Carolina pastor John-Paul Miller, fed many conspiracy theorists online. But the Robeson County Sheriff’s office has since denied that aid from federal officials was in regards to Mica’s specific case. Investigators have been in contact with federal authorities “since the early stages of the Mica Miller investigation,” Robeson County Sheriff Burnis Wilkins said in a statement obtained by Inside Edition.

(SAO PAULO) — While flooding that has devastated Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul state has yet to subside, another scourge has spread across the region: disinformation on social media that has hampered desperate efforts to get aid to hundreds of thousands in need. Among fake postings that have stirred outrage: That official agencies aren’t conducting rescues in Brazil’s southernmost state.

In George Miller’s 2015 Mad Max: Fury Road—a sequel to the post-apocalyptic chronicle Miller kicked off in the late 1970s, with Mel Gibson as a scrappy lone warrior seeking to preserve some vestige of civilization—Charlize Theron played Imperator Furiosa, a one-armed nut-buster fixed on a single goal: to free a bevy of sex slaves kept by a mouth-breathing warlord named Immortan Joe, who also happened to be her old boss.