Dinosaur-era bird with scythe-like beak sheds light on avian diversity - Yahoo News

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A delicate but exquisitely preserved skull of a crow-sized bird with a scythe-like beak that inhabited Madagascar 68 million years ago is showing scientists that they have a lot of learn about avian diversity during the age of dinosaurs.

Birds evolved from small feathered dinosaurs about 150 million years ago.

It belonged to an avian group, enantiornithines, that did not survive the mass extinction event 66 million years ago, ending the Cretaceous Period.

Journalist Eli Lake, an aggressive critic of the government’s handling of the investigation into Trump and Russia, said that while there was a “scandal” in how the FBI conducted parts of its investigation, there was not a “deep state conspiracy.”.

Within days, more than 5 million people had signed petitions on the home page of Moon Jae-in, the South Korean president, demanding that the authorities withdraw his right to anonymity.

In the Rose Garden Tuesday, President Trump pardoned Corn the turkey at the annual Thanksgiving ceremony.

Former President Barack Obama, already a million-selling author, is also a prize-winning author.

government civil servants could face mass firings under an October executive order before President Donald Trump leaves office and Democratic lawmakers, watchdog groups and unions are mobilizing to block the move.

No one is really sure what Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner will do after leaving the White House in January or where they will live, but people who know them are certain they plan on getting out of Washington, D.C., as fast as they can, The New York Times reports.

President Trump's daughter and son-in-law have never fit in, several people told the Times, but it's not a sure bet that they will return to New York City.

Donny Deutsch, a marketing expert and critic of the president, said he thinks Ivanka and Jared would have an "even harder time than Trump himself" moving back to Manhattan.

Two friends told the Times Trump could revive her jewelry and clothing lines, peddling it to a conservative audience, but two others said the Ivanka Trump brand is dead and won't sell.

As for Kushner, who worked in real estate, Deutsch said he could go back to making deals, and "if he's doing anything with the Trump name, he can monetize it in red areas."The couple could be thinking about settling in New Jersey, where they have a large "cottage" on the grounds of the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster.

It might seem like a headline from a satirical newspaper, but it is not: Spanish will no longer be the official language of the Spanish State or the lingua franca in education.

This war on the Spanish language is the ransom that socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez has to pay the Catalan nationalists of ERC (a party that represents 3 percent of Spanish voters) in exchange for their vote to pass a general state budget of which Chávez would have been proud.

Sánchez will do anything to stay in power, even trample on Spain’s greatest treasure, one that is shared with 500 million people: the Spanish language.Thanks to this new law, the only lingua franca in Catalonia will be Catalan.As a Spaniard, it is difficult for me to explain to people outside my country what is happening here without sounding dire.

In Catalonia, mathematics, science, and philosophy will continue to be taught in Catalan, as they have been for years, hindering the education of those children who don't speak it.

What has changed now is that the war on the Spanish language will be made official, sponsored by the Spanish state itself.

The policy is about as intelligent as repeatedly hitting one's big toe with a hammer to cure osteoarthritis.The cause of this madness is an extreme-left Catalan nationalist party that represents relatively few Spanish voters, and that within Catalonia represents 22 percent of voters.

The case of the Pujol family is well known in Catalonia; the clan behind the current Catalan nationalism and the region’s former president Jordi Pujol are involved in an endless judicial investigation for corruption in which millions of dollars, diverted from the Catalan people, keep cropping up in tax havens.

Behind every extravagant nationalist policy, there is an elite class of government officials and associated companies getting rich.The Spanish language has been in the sights of the nationalists since the beginning of democracy.

The Spanish people speak in whatever language we prefer to, and we regard all the country’s state languages a source of cultural richness; not as a reason for confrontation.

In Catalonia, for example, nationalism does not seek to reaffirm a Catalan identity, but to damage Spain.

Today, children who speak Spanish are humiliated, singled out, and even attacked in schools.

The party that has imposed the Galician language for the names of towns and streets is the PP, strangely the same party that, in parliament, denounces not being able to study in Spanish in Catalonia.

To be fair, the regions governed by the PP, including Galicia, have already stated that they will use all the legal means at their disposal to not apply this state mandate, at least regarding the exclusion of the Spanish language and the end of academic meritocracy.The new education law, however, not only gifts us with the muzzling of Cervantes’s language, but also hides an unprecedented attack on Catholic schools.

There is now an emotive campaign on social networks in which dozens of children with mental illnesses and disabilities are asking the government not to close their school where they are attended by specialists, and they beg for their parents to be given the right to choose freely.Unfortunately, Spain’s current socialist minister, Isabel Celaa (who of course sent her daughters to a Catholic women’s charter school), recently made clear what socialists think about your children: that they belong to the state: “Children are not the property of their parents.” Some parents quipped on social networks: “Madam Minister, since my children are not mine and you are in charge of everything, I ask you to come home this morning at 2, 4, and 6 to feed and change diapers, and please do not forget the antibiotics for the eldest, who is due medication at 3 in the morning.

Omar's underperformance was largely in line with down-ballot Democrats across the state, many of whom underperformed Biden in the suburbs