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Experts say a special breed found in Madagascar could hold the key to keeping them alive. But there are only five known trees in existence. Scientists are racing to develop new banana varieties strong enough to survive Panama disease, which is a major threat to banana crops around the world. Because bananas are clones, the disease is able to spread very quickly from one to another. It is currently wreaking havoc with crops in Asia – but could wipe out the world’s supply if it spreads to America. Richard Allen, senior conservation assessor at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, told...

Today’s Campaign Update (Because The Campaign Never Ends) Tired of all this Winning yet? Part I – With Justice Anthony Kennedy announcing his long-anticipated retirement from Supreme Court on Wednesday, it was just like Election Night 2016 over at CNN. Check out these looooooooonnnnnng faces: Just charming, aren’t they? Tired of all this Winning yet? Part II – Oh, but it got even better over on Twitter (because liberal outrage and angst is always better on Twitter), with SJWs and snowflakes wailing out their innermost feelings in 280 characters or less. Here are a couple of examples: Matthew K. @mattiek17...

I have reached a regrettable conclusion in the era of Trump. I no longer have hope in white America... Those of us whose identities have made us the direct targets of the Trump administration’s hateful rhetoric and discriminatory policies are told to not stoop to President Trump’s level. We are then fed cherry-picked quotes from black luminaries, — or a favorite from Michelle Obama’s convention speech: “When they go low, we go high.”... As for going high? Trump rose to power in no small part due to his promises to bury the political accomplishments of the first black president... Those...

Do you smell that, patriots? Kick aside the dirty needles and piles of human feces you find on the quaint streets of Seattle and San Francisco. Make your way past the tattooed and body-pierced non-binary, genderqueers of Berkeley and Brooklyn. Hold your nose as you step over an able-bodied millennial who is choosing homelessness #BecauseAntifa. You’ll find that littered among the fetid armpits and unwashed hair of liberals, there is an underlying and deeper scent: the scent of desperation and fear. The full liberal meltdown is now on full display. Every week there’s another reason for these exceedingly unhappy lumps...

From President Donald Trump’s policy of separating the children of illegal immigrants to Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, there was a lot for lefties in the media and Hollywood to lose their heads over this month. Anchors and reporters depicted the “despot” Trump and those who voted for him as Nazis that were making the Statue of Liberty weep. Reporting from one of the detention centers CBS This Morning co-anchor Gayle King, on June 18, fretted: “The Statue of Liberty, I think, is weeping right now.” But that wasn’t as awful as MSNBC’s Morning Joe crew. On June 15 co-host Joe...

President Trump, with his refusal to take advice or yield to experts, is the West Wing. Republicans who control both halves of Congress won't lift a finger against him and fully support his every move. The big picture: With his chance to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, Trump may have fewer checks on his power than any president in his lifetime. (Trump was born in 1946, the year after FDR died in office, 72 years ago.) Show less The media, normally the last check on a president with total control of government, has lost the trust of most Republicans and many...

`Oumuamua, pronounced oh-MOO-ah-MOO-ah – is moving away from the sun faster than expected. The Hubble Space Telescope made the discovery, in cooperation with ground-based telescopes... The measured gain in ‘Oumuamua’s speed is tiny, these astronomers said. Plus, our sun is still trying to drag `Oumuamua back; that is, the sun’s gravity is still slowing down the object, though not as fast as predicted by celestial mechanics. Marco Micheli of the European Space Agency led the team that explored several scenarios to explain ‘Oumuamua’s faster-than-predicted speed. The most likely explanation is that `Oumuamua is venting material from its surface due to...

And who knows — they may be right. While the Left melts down at the retirement of centrist Justice Anthony Kennedy, the path to confirming a conservative activist to the court looks much more fraught than people might think. Thanks to the GOP’s threadbare control of the Senate, it might be tough to round up 51 votes for a bold shift to the Right.At least, that’s what Democrats are hoping, according to NBC: Within hours of Wednesday’s surprising retirement announcement from Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, two moderate Republican women in the Senate became an important focus of Democrats...

The retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy could allow the nation’s highest court to change its mind on whether the Environmental Protection Agency has to fight climate change. As a crucial swing vote, the Reagan appointee joined liberals in a landmark 5-4 decision in 2007 that the EPA is required to address climate change if its own scientists found that it posed a risk to public health. Two years later the agency made exactly that determination, issuing a scientific document known as the endangerment finding. “We’re not going to get another Kennedy who’s going to play that moderating role,”...

This morning on ABC’s Good Morning America, journalists for the network continued losing their collective minds over Supreme Court Justice Kennedy’s announcement that he was retiring from the bench. ABC led its morning coverage Thursday with three reports, portraying the news that President Trump would pick his successor, as a move back into the Dark Ages with abortion rights at stake. “It guarantees that this court and this country is going to change profoundly,” correspondent Terry Moran gushed. Anchor Robin Roberts opened by noting dramatically that “every American” could be affected by this new SCOTUS pick. Correspondent Terry Moran touted...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spiked the panic on the left by announcing efforts to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy before the midterms. The Supreme Court Justice announced his retirement Wednesday, effective July 31, after more than three decades on the high court. His successor, chosen by President Trump, could transform the Supreme Court for years to come and the left is in a meltdown. “We will vote to confirm Justice Kennedy’s successor this fall,” McConnell said on the Senate floor after the news broke. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley echoed the expectations that the nomination process would begin soon. “For...

I’m still ticked off at him for not building the wall, but THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP, FOR POINTING OUT THAT MAXINE WATERS HAS A LOW I.Q.! And there’s more great news! Contrary to every single New York Times editorial and opinion piece on the president’s “Muslim ban,” this week, the Supreme Court upheld the ban. Or, as a Times op-ed put it back on Jan. 27, 2017: “(T)he order is illegal. More than 50 years ago, Congress outlawed such discrimination against immigrants based on national origin. …” — “Trump’s Immigration Ban Is Illegal,” by David J. Bier, immigration policy analyst...

News Releases VIDEO: Senator Murray Sounds the Alarm on Supreme Court Justice Kennedy’s Retirement: “I share the deep concern of so many families across this country who…fear further erosion of the progress we have made”(Washington, D.C.) – Today in her first public comments after Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the nation’s highest court, handing President Trump a second Supreme Court nomination opportunity, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) voiced the concerns of millions of people across the country about considering a nomination from a president who has spent every day in office testing the limits of the...

h California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris said there would be the “destruction of the Constitution” if President Donald Trump got to pick the Supreme Court justice to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews.” “We’re looking at a destruction of the Constitution of the United States as far as I can tell based on all the folks he’s been appointing thus far for lifetime appointments,” Harris told Matthews on Wednesday night. “He’s been appointing ideologues, he’s been appoint people who have refused to agree that Brown v. Board of Education is settled law.” Harris’s comment was...

The news that Justice Anthony Kennedy has retired from the Supreme Court is sending liberals and progressives into a panic. Kennedy has of course been the key swing vote in abortion and gay rights cases. Whether those cases will withstand a new Supreme Court with five core conservatives is a serious question. But there is another area of Supreme Court jurisprudence that may also be dramatically affected by Kennedy’s retirement: the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court has only ruled in favor of an individual right to own guns in two decisions, and in neither one did Kennedy write his own...

The House is about to vote on impeachment articles against President Trump. Democratic Rep. Al Green of Texas said he will force a vote on impeaching Trump as early as Wednesday. Republicans will easily table the symbolic vote, but it will put lawmakers on the record. “Three prominent Democrats have asked to meet with me to discuss impeachment,” Green said on the floor Tuesday. Green appeared to be referring to members within his party’s leadership who have urged him to stop his campaign to force an impeachment vote. “I will tell them I refuse to sit on the sidelines while...

Market doomsayer Marc "Dr. Doom" Faber has launched a racially charged diatribe in his latest newsletter, alleging that the U.S. is great primarily because it is ruled by white people. The eccentric Gloom, Boom & Doom report author, who often speaks on CNBC and other financial media, generally forecasting some type of market downturn, focused his latest comments on the racial conflicts happening around the country. (A CNBC spokesperson said it will not book him in the future.) "And thank God white people populated America, and not the blacks. Otherwise, the US would look like Zimbabwe, which it might look...

In fathoming the failure of Europeans to protect their own interests against the onslaught of Islamic jihadism, one is reminded of Ayn Rand's quotation that "[r]eason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them[.]" Bruce Bawer, an astute observer of the European scene, wonders how "Marine Le Pen lost in a landslide" given all the jihadist assaults against the French people and the very culture of France. Bawer offers three possibilities that include: European guilt about past imperial histories and a "need to atone." the postmodern belief that "no culture is...

A huge well of molten carbon that would spell disaster for the planet if released has been found under the US. Scientists using the world's largest array of seismic sensors have mapped a deep-Earth area, covering 700,000 sq miles (1.8 million sq km). This is around the size of Mexico, and researchers say it has the potential to cause untold environmental damage. The discovery could change our understanding of how much carbon the Earth contains, suggesting it is much more than we previously believed. It would be impossible to drill far enough down to physically 'see' the Earth's mantle,...