Hikers have embarked on a 500-mile (805-kilometer) expedition that will traverse New Mexico. The mission: Chart out the best route and identify what challenges might lie ahead as the state moves closer to establishing the Rio Grande Trail.

Following in the footsteps of other states, New Mexico is looking to capitalize on its vistas, mild weather and culture with the creation of a long-distance trail along one of North America’s longest rivers.

The Rio Grande stretches down the middle of the state, from the southern end of the Rocky Mountains near the Colorado state line to the bustling desert region where New Mexico and Texas intersect with the U.S.-Mexico border.

Supporters say that with its diverse scenery, the Rio Grande Trail has the potential to make the list of the country’s more famous long-distance routes, including the Appalachian Trail that runs from Georgia to Maine and the Continental Divide Trail that crosses a handful of Western states. Neighboring Colorado and Arizona have their own namesake trails and there are several others that are designed as national scenic trails.

Outdoor recreation in New Mexico alone is already a multibillion-dollar industry and the benefits of the Rio Grande Trail could be profound, said Jeff Steinborn, a New Mexico state senator who pushed legislation in 2015 to create the commission charged with establishing the trail.

“We can’t even begin to appreciate all the opportunities that it will unfold for our citizens, for economic development and for frontier communities,” he said.

Appalachian study

In the East, more than 3 million people visit some part of the Appalachian Trail annually. The trail’s advocacy group is working on a study to better determine the spending that results from those visits and the branding campaigns that go along with such long-distance trail systems.

Jordan Bowman, a spokesman for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, said it’s all tied to the draw of experiencing the American backcountry.

“It’s whatever adventure you want to make out of it,” he said. “So people can find a nice smooth section if they just need to get out for an afternoon or it can be a monthslong adventure where you walk out with a beard and this incredible story of how you survived a blizzard or whatever the case may be.”

In New Mexico, the Rio Grande Trail Commission last week approved an official logo, and a master plan is in the works.

While the official alignment has yet to be decided, this month’s expedition by volunteers with the Southern New Mexico Trail Alliance is aimed at scouting proposed segments and gathering as much data about water sources, camping spots, supply stops and not-to-be-missed scenery that could be incorporated.

“A lot of those little details we can’t pick up until we’re actually there on the ground walking it,” said Peter Livingstone with the alliance.

He has traveled more than 120 miles (190 kilometers) in five days. He expects the whole trip to take about a month.

A small solar panel sits on the top of his backpack, charging a collection of GPS and satellite communication devices that are tracking the journey.

Just in case

“I have a map and compass if all that fancy stuff fails,” Livingstone said.

The expedition so far has taken him along the volcanic ridge that makes up the Rio Grande Gorge near Taos. To the west, there are numerous homes dubbed earthships built out of recycled materials. Wheeler Peak — the highest in New Mexico — is visible to the east.

Livingstone also talked about petroglyphs, adobe churches, driving rain, hail and being greeted by locals with beans, rice and tacos.

“Life is a wonderful adventure, or it is nothing,” he said in a recent post.

The trek will end near Mount Cristo Rey, where the faithful make a religious pilgrimage each year. Steinborn plans to join the hikers there.

Close to 50 miles (80 kilometers) or more of trail already have been designated and there are another 100 miles (160 kilometers) or so being planned with the federal government and conservancy districts in the Middle Rio Grande, Steinborn said.

“There’s work to be done, but what an incredible start. It’s coming to life in front of our eyes,” he said. 
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From: MeNeedIt

Authorities in the U.S. and Britain are stepping up cooperation to tackle female genital mutilation, staging joint operations at airports in London, New York and elsewhere to raise awareness of an issue that affects millions of girls and women worldwide.

Police and border security agencies on both sides of the Atlantic have signed a new agreement to share intelligence about when and where victims may be taken for the procedure, known as FGM, and help identify perpetrators. 

In the past week, officials also targeted travel hubs including Heathrow, JKF airport and Eurostar stations, approaching people traveling from countries where the practice is common and encouraging them to report any concerns.

The mutilation of girls’ external genitals for non-medical reasons is practiced across Africa, the Middle East and Asia. It also affects immigrant communities in Europe and the U.S.
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From: MeNeedIt

Language detectives say the key clues to who wrote the anonymous New York Times opinion piece slamming President Donald Trump may not be the odd and glimmering “lodestar,” but the itty-bitty words that people usually read right over: “I,” “of” and “but.”

And lodestar? That could be a red herring meant to throw sleuths off track, some experts say.

Experts use a combination of language use, statistics and computer science to help figure out who wrote documents that are anonymous or possibly plagiarized. They’ve even solved crimes and historical mysteries that way. Some call the field forensic linguistics, others call it stylometry or simply doing “author attribution.”

The field is suddenly at center stage after an unidentified “senior administration official” wrote in the Times that he or she was part of a “resistance” movement working from within the administration to curb Trump’s most dangerous impulses.

“My phone has been ringing off the hook with requests to do that analysis and I just don’t have the time,” says Duquesne University computer and language scientist Patrick Juola.

Robert Leonard, a Hofstra University linguistics professor who has helped solve murders by examining language, says if experts could get the right number of writing samples from officials whose identities are known, “an analysis could certainly be done.”

One political scientist figures there are about 50 people in the Trump administration who fit the Times’ description as a senior administration official and could be the author. The key would be to look at how they write, the words they use, what words they put next to each other, spelling, punctuation and even tenses, experts say.

“Language is a set of choices. What to say, how to say and when to say it,”Juola says. “And there’s a lot of different options.”

One of the favorite techniques of Juola and other experts is to look at what’s called “function words.” These are words people use all the time but that are hard to define because they more provide function than meaning. Some examples are “of,” “with,” “the,” “a,” “over” and “and.”

“We all use them but we don’t use them in the same way,” Juola says. “We don’t use them in the same frequency.” Same goes with apostrophes and other punctuation.

For example, do you say “different from” or “different than?” asks computer science and data expert Shlomo Argamon of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Women tend to use first- and second-person pronouns more — “I,” “me” and “you” — and more present tense, Argamon says.

Men use “the,” “of,” “this” and “that” more often, he says.

There’s even a website that is based on Argamon’s research that tries to determine whether a writer is male or female. Argamon calls it just a toy and the site says it isn’t perfect. In fact, several female writers at The Associated Press were called male, as was the writer of the Times’ opinion piece.

“You look for clues and you try to assess the usefulness of those clues,” Argamon says. But he is less optimistic that the Trump opinion piece case will be cracked for various reasons, including the New York Times’ editing for style and possible efforts to fool language detectives with words that someone else likes to use such as “lodestar.” Mostly, he’s pessimistic because to do a proper comparison, samples from all suspects have to be gathered and have to be similar, such as all opinion columns as opposed to novels, speeches or magazine stories.

Rachel Greenstadt at Drexel University studies when people try to throw off investigators with words they don’t normally use or purposeful bad spellings. She says her first instinct is that the word “lodestar” — one Vice President Mike Pence has used several times — is “a red herring.” It seems too deliberate.

Greenstadt says language analysis “could kind of contribute to the picture” of who wrote the Times’ opinion pieces, but she adds “by itself, I’d be concerned to use it.”

Literary sleuthing

Still, with the right conditions words matter.

Juola testified in about 15 trials and handled even more cases that never made it to court. His biggest case was in 2013, when a British newspaper got a tip that the book The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith was really written by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. In about an hour, Juola fed two Rowling books, The Cuckoo’s Calling and six other novels into his computer, analyzed the language patterns with four different systems and concluded that Rowling did it.

A couple of days later, Rowling confessed.

It was far from the first time that language use fingered the real culprit. The Unabomber’s brother identified him because of his distinctive writing style. Field pioneers helped find a kidnapper who used the unique term “devil strip” for the grassy area between the sidewalk and road. The phrase is only used in parts of Ohio.

Even in politics, words are poker tells. In 1996, the novel Primary Colors about a Clintonesque presidential candidate set Washington abuzz trying to figure out who was the anonymous author. An analysis by a Vassar professor and other work pointed to Newsweek’s Joe Klein and he finally admitted it.

But the literary sleuthing goes back to the founding of the republic. Historians had a hard time figuring out which specific Federalist Papers were written by Alexander Hamilton and which were by James Madison. A 1963 statistical analysis figured it out: One of the many clues came down to usage of the words “while” and “whilst.” Madison used “whilst”; Hamilton preferred “while.”

Juola says experts in the field can generally tell introverts from extroverts, men from women, education level, age, location, almost everything but astrological sign.

“The science is very good,” Juola said. “It’s not quite DNA. It’s actually considered by some scientists to be considered the second-most accurate form of forensic identification we have because it is so good.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Tropical Storm Gordon weakened Wednesday into a tropical depression, while forecasters kept their eyes on a strong storm churning in the Atlantic.

Gordon never strengthened into a hurricane but still brought misery along the central U.S. Gulf Coast. The storm knocked out power, caused floods and spawned several tornadoes. It was responsible for at least one death, when a large piece of a tree fell on a mobile home in Pensacola, Florida, killing a 10-month-old baby.

Flash flood watches were out from the Florida Panhandle west to as far north as Illinois as Gordon moved farther inland.

Meanwhile, forecasters were watching Florence, a strong Category 4 storm that was about 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) east of Bermuda as of late Wednesday.

Forecasters predicted Florence would weaken a bit over the next few days but would still be a powerful storm as it crept closer to Bermuda and the U.S. East Coast. That arrival was expected early next week.

Florence would be the first major Atlantic hurricane of the season to make landfall.
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From: MeNeedIt

Britain risks huge disruptions to its economy and society, including trade, transport, health care and citizens’ rights, if it leaves the European Union next March without a deal. That’s the conclusion of a new report on the short-term risks of a so-called ‘no-deal Brexit.’ The report comes as lawmakers return to London after a six-week summer break to face growing uncertainty over Britain’s future relations with the EU. Henry Ridgwell reports from London.
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From: MeNeedIt

Brazil’s National Museum said Wednesday that centuries-old Torah scrolls, considered to be some of Judaism’s oldest documents, had been moved before a massive fire ravaged the place and gutted much of the largest collections of national history artifacts in Latin America. 

Questions about the fate of the scrolls had swirled since Sunday night’s blaze at the museum, which used to be the home of Brazil’s royal family. Amid an ongoing investigation and unable to access much of the now destroyed museum, officials have been reluctant to give any account of how specific artifacts fared in the fire or disclose information on other material that may have been in other locations. 

“The Torah is being kept in a safe place,” according to a museum statement sent to The Associated Press on Wednesday, adding it had been removed nearly two years ago. The statement did not say where it had been transferred.

A spokesman at the Israeli Embassy in the capital Brasilia said it didn’t have more information on the Torah, Judaism’s holy book.

Brazilian scholars have said the scrolls originated in Yemen and possibly date back to the 13th century.

The museum’s website says the nine scrolls, written in Hebrew, were acquired in the early 19th century by the country’s last monarch, Dom Pedro II. The website, which had apparently not been updated, also said the scrolls were not part of an exhibit, but rather kept in a safe in the director’s office. 

Avraham Beuthner, from the Jewish organization Beit Lubavitch in Rio de Janeiro, told the AP that university officials told him the Torah was being housed at a university library near the museum. The museum is part of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. 

Beuthner said he had been fielding calls from Jews in Israel and several Latin American countries since the fire inquiring about the relic.

“Thank God it’s safe,” he said, adding that university officials had promised to soon allow Jewish community leaders to see where the Torah is being held.

The good news came as museum officials said they feared as much as 90 percent of Latin America’s largest collection of treasures might have been lost in the fire. Aerial photos of the main building showed only heaps of rubble and ashes in the parts of the building where the roof collapsed. 

Firefighters on Tuesday “found fragments of bones in a room where the museum kept many items, including skulls,” said Cristiana Serejo, the museum’s deputy director. “We still have to collect them and take them to the lab to know exactly what they are.” 

In its collection of about 20 million items, one of the most prized possessions is a skull called Luzia, which is among the oldest fossils ever found in the Americas.

With the cause of the fire still under investigation, the disaster has led to a series of recriminations amid accusations that successive governments haven’t sufficiently funded the museum, and it has raised concerns that other institutions might be at risk. Officials have said it was well known that the building was vulnerable to fire and in need of extensive repair.

A UNESCO group of specialists in recovery and reconstruction are expected to arrive in Brazil next week, according Maria Edileuza Fontele Reis, the organization’s ambassador in Brazil. 

The group “has experience working with pieces of national heritage in areas of war, such as in Iraq, and areas impacted by fire,” Fontele Reis told the AP in a phone interview.
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From: MeNeedIt

Reality television star Kim Kardashian West, who successfully pushed President Donald Trump to grant a pardon for a drug offender earlier this year, returned to the White House on Wednesday for a meeting with senior aides as part of the administration’s efforts on criminal justice reform.

Kardashian, who may have felt right at home with the drama-infused atmosphere in the West Wing as it grapples with the fallout from Bob Woodward’s new book, participated in a listening session on clemency and prison reform with several staffers, including the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

“The discussion is mainly focused on ways to improve that process to ensure deserving cases receive a fair review,” according to Hogan Gidley, White House deputy press secretary.

Among the others in attendance were CNN commentator Van Jones, Shon Hopwood, a lawyer who served time in prison for bank robbery and Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, who has been instrumental in steering Trump’s Supreme Court picks, including Brett Kavanaugh, whose confirmation hearings have begun on Capitol Hill.

But the headliner was Kardashian, who last visited the White House three months ago to press for a pardon for 63-year-old Alice Marie Johnson. At the time, the reality star, dressed in black, posed for an instantly iconic – and seemingly somber – photo with Trump in the Oval Office, though there were no plans for her to meet with the president on Wednesday.

One week after Kardashian’s visit, Trump granted Johnson clemency, freeing her from prison after a more than two-decade stint on drug charges.

“When I looked at Alice, I said we can’t just stop with one person. We have to change the laws,” Kardashian said in a statement released by #cut50, a group that looks to reduce incarceration time.

The pardon for Johnson was one of several instances where the president has used his constitutional power to pardon federal crimes. Trump in May pardoned conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza and suggested he was considering a commutation for former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and a pardon for lifestyle guru Martha Stewart. He has not yet acted on either front.

“We are working to build support for prison reform, sentencing reform, and fair treatment of people coming home from prison,” said Van Jones. “When you have prominent people like Kim helping voiceless people behind bars – like Chris Young who she is advocating for today – that’s incredibly powerful.”

Kardashian gave an interview this week in which she said she would lobby for Young, who was charged in December 2010 for being involved in drug trafficking in Clarksville, Tennessee. He was later convicted and, due to mandatory minimum sentencing, was given life in prison without parole after being arrested for marijuana and cocaine possession.

 Kushner has added prison reform to his broad portfolio, though others in the administration – namely Attorney General Jeff Sessions – support the toughest possible sentences for drug and other convictions. The president’s son-in-law has had an interest in prison reform since his own father, Charles Kushner, was incarcerated for 14 months after being convicted of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering.

TMZ first reported Kardashian’s Wednesday visit to the White House.
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From: MeNeedIt

Kenyan artist Michael Soi is criticizing China’s relationship with Africa through his collection of paintings at Nairobi’s Circle Art Gallery that depict the interest that China is showing in Africa. The 74-piece collection underscores China’s heavy involvement in the continent by depicting Africa as a woman being lured by China.
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From: MeNeedIt

The technology sector provides many jobs for today’s innovators. But one scientist and teacher in Cameroon says there’s no reason why women should not be part of that technological growth. She’s making it her goal to prepare more young girls to enter the workforce. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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From: MeNeedIt

Mormon church founder Joseph Smith insisted on introducing polygamy in the early 1800s despite knowing the societal risks and getting pushback from other leaders and his first wife, recounts a new church history book unveiled Tuesday.

A nearly 600-page book that covers early church history from 1815-1846 doesn’t dwell on polygamy, but doesn’t skip over it either. That’s noteworthy and marks The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ latest attempt to be more transparent about sensitive issues of its past. 

Quentin L. Cook and Dale Renlund, high-ranking leaders with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said the parts about plural marriage provide the full story within the context of what was happening at that time in history.   

“There is discussion of how it began, how it was viewed by the individuals and its part of the history of the restored gospel,” said Renlund, a member of a top governing panel called the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. “It’s taken in that context without shying away from it. So, a person can get a clear view of what was going on and when and why.”

The book recounts founder Joseph Smith’s introduction of plural marriage after he received what he believed was a revelation from the Lord. The book details how his wife, Emma Smith, and many leaders recoiled and questioned the direction.

At one point, the faith’s polygamous practices led an excommunicated Mormon to publish an expose about the religion and give lectures titled, “The secret wife system at Nauvoo,” the new book says. Some Mormon leaders denied the allegation because polygamy was being practiced secretly and they were unaware.

Previous acknowledgments

The book’s recognition of polygamy — which the faith banned in 1890 and prohibits today — is the most recent example of the Utah-based faith acknowledging polygamous roots.

The faith published an online essay in 2014 that provided a detailed account of polygamous practices during the 1830s and 1840s in Kirtland, Ohio, and Nauvoo, Illinois. That essay acknowledged that while most of Smith’s wives were between 20 and 40 years old, he had one who was 14 years old.  

That young bride isn’t mentioned in the new book, but it does tell the story of his marriages to a pair of sisters who were older teens.

In 2015, the church included a small display about plural marriages when it opened its renovated history museum.

The book is a robust and honest version of early church history and while it doesn’t dwell on polygamy, it’s notable that it provides the history of plural marriages in a straightforward way, said Patrick Mason, a professor of religion at Claremont Graduate University in California who is the chair of Mormon Studies at the college.

Steven E. Snow, executive director of the church history department, said the book provides the whole story behind a difficult time and one that is not well understood.

“If people read this, they’ll understand we’ve been pretty forthright in our telling of the story,” Snow said.

Future books

The book is the first of four planned volumes that will retell the story of the faith. The first volume covers Joseph Smith’s “first vision” in which he said he received a visit from God and Jesus in 1820 in the woods of upstate New York that led to the foundation of the religion. It also tells the story of when Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were fatally shot by a mob in 1844.

The last multi-volume history of the faith was published in 1930 — when church membership was less than 1 million with most members in the American West. Today, the faith counts 16 million members with more than half outside the U.S. The book is available in 14 languages.

Snow said the book “draws on the power of narrative, but is not fiction,” with every scene and dialogue backed by historical research. 
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From: MeNeedIt

In 2010, Natalie Portman opened the Venice Film Festival as a tormented ballerina in “Black Swan,” a role that earned her an Oscar. She was back Tuesday with “Vox Lux,” as a brattish pop star with a troubled past.

That past plays out in the film’s early scenes, where Portman’s character, Celeste, played as a 14-year-old girl by Raffey Cassidy, has her life transformed by a school shooting that leaves her wounded and psychologically scarred.

A song Celeste plays at a televised memorial for the dead propels her to fame, condemning the sweet young girl to grow up into an infantilized pop princess, managed by Jude Law who veers between nurturing and sleazy.

Speaking ahead of its world premiere, Portman said “Vox Lux” was “a portrait and a reflection of our society and this sort of intersection of pop culture and violence and the spectacle that we equate between the two.”

Calling the regularity of school shootings in the United States “a sort of civil war,” she added: “The psychological impact of what that means for every kid going to school every day, every parent dropping their kids off every day … small acts of violence can create widespread psychological torment.”

Writer-director Brady Corbet, who won prizes in Venice in 2015 for his debut “The Childhood of a Leader,” said Portman’s character was “really not designed to be a monster at all.”

“She’s as much a victim of the era as she is a leader of the era … the film is very much about the fact that the 20th century was marked by the term ‘the banality of evil’ and the 21st century, I think, will be defined by the ‘pageantry of evil.’”

With songs composed by Australian singer-songwriter Sia, “Vox Lux” is one of 21 films vying for the Golden Lion, which will be awarded in Venice on Sept 8.
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From: MeNeedIt

Brazil’s National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, which suffered a massive fire late Sunday, boasted the largest archive of historical artifacts and documents in Latin America, some 20 million pieces from around the globe. Museum officials say it’s too soon to say what has been lost or spared.

Here is a look at some of the museum’s most notable pieces, according to its website:

‘Luzia’

Discovered during an excavation in 1975 outside of the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, the fossilized remains sat in storage for two decades. In the mid-1990s, tests by scientists determined it was the oldest fossil in the Americas. It was given the name “Luzia,” homage to “Lucy,” the famous 3.2-million-year-old remains found in Africa.

Ancient Egypt

Among the Egyptian relics is the mummy of Sha-Amun-In-Su, dating to 750 B.C. The mummy was in its original coffin, which was closed. It was given to Brazil’s emperor, Dom Pedro II, by Egyptian Viceroy Ismail Pasha during a visit to the Middle East. Egyptian authorities have expressed concern about the fate of the collection and the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities has told Brazilian authorities that it is ready to extend technical help for the restoration of artifacts.

Indigenous remains 

One of the museum’s most important expositions of indigenous peoples were three bodies mummified together, an adult and two children. It was originally found in the state of Minas Gerais. The collection also includes bows and arrows from different indigenous groups and explanations about studies conducted by the royal family on the Tupi and Guarani languages.

Meteorite

Called Bendego and weighing more than 5 tons, the meteorite is the largest ever found in Brazil. It was found in the state of Bahia in the 18th century. The meteorite, which sits in a main entrance, could be seen in the burned-out building.

Dinosaur 

One of the museum’s most popular displays was one of its biggest, a dinosaur called Maxakalisaurus tapai. Found in Minas Gerais in 1998, the excavation and reconstruction of the dinosaur took 10 years.
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From: MeNeedIt