I’m a statriotic Minnesotan but I’ve lived in the UK for 12 years and I’m going to become a dual citizen.

After living abroad for 12 years, I see America’s strengths and weaknesses more clearly, just as I see Britain’s strengths and weaknesses more clearly as an outsider.

Life here in Britain has its problems – the cost-of-living crisis and the general decline post-Brexit are real and serious – but here are some tremendous strengths – and endearing oddities, too.

STRENGTHS  

There is interesting history everywhere. When I was a kid in Minnesota , we went on a field trip to one of the oldest grand houses in the state, which was built in 1891. Since moving to the UK, I’ve lived in a cottage that was built in the 16th century – 1578, to be precise. It had no closets. The floor was slanted. It was lovely.

Cities/towns are much more walkable than in the US and there are tens of thousands of miles of walking paths, fanning out in every direction. It really is extraordinary. Where I live, there are several long-distance paths where you can walk out of your door and continue on the same path for hundreds of miles. If baseball and apple pie are America’s national pastimes, having tea after a countryside walk on Sundays seems to be a fair nominee for one of Britain’s most cherished rituals.

Most villages are utterly charming. There are several bleak industrial towns and cities, but most British villages are picturesque, complete with at least one pub, a church (often a very old one), old terraced houses, and nice walking paths crisscrossing it, often near some body of water. (If there is no body of water nearby, you are, of course, welcome to swim in your own bin.)

Healthcare is a guaranteed right and it’s free at the point of service. The NHS has issues, but every experience I’ve had has been overwhelmingly positive.

British political humour is hilarious. (If you haven’t seen The Thick of It, watch it.) Whenever the prime minister is getting elected, they have to stand, flanked by crazy people and joke candidates, such Lord Buckethead and Count Binface.

There is virtually zero risk of getting shot. (It’s also a myth that stabbings are more frequent in the UK compared to the US; there are more stabbings per capita in America.)

There is tremendous social capital and people are, for the most part, friendly, polite, and terrified of social awkwardness. (The mathematical definition of a limit approaching, but never reaching, zero is the final morsel of cheese at a British dinner party, which subdivides endlessly, until it is approximately one micron long and one micron wide, at which point it will be thrown away.)

You can travel most places in Europe in an hour or two, often for under $100 if you plan ahead. (I once took a morning Eurostar train from London to Brussels – it takes around two hours – gave a lunchtime talk at the European Union, had some Belgian beer and a little walk around, then returned home by 5pm.)

Pubs are wonderful institutions. Enough said.

The London Tube [subway] is fantastic. It’s clean, safe, and reliable. Most of the time, it’s so reliable that waiting anything beyond two or three minutes for a train in central London is deemed an annoyance.

Most places, there are very few annoying bugs (Scotland’s midges are a notable exception). You can just leave your doors and windows open without screens.

Almost everywhere is dog-friendly: bars, restaurants, bookstores, you name it.

THE ODDITIES

To turn the light on in many bathrooms, you need not find a light switch, but a little string hanging from the ceiling, which you pull. Nobody knows why.

To get warm in the winter, many people – yes, even in the 21st century – boil water and pour it into a red rubber bag, sometimes with a furry cover over it if you’re extra fancy. These ‘hot water bottles’ are staples of British homes.

Tiny country lanes that would be considered sidewalks in America are supposed to accommodate two normal-sized cars going at speed in opposite directions, often flanked by unforgiving hedges. When you encounter another car, one of you will reverse, sometimes a great distance, often over tree roots, into a tiny little ‘passing place’. (Both drivers are obligated, by British social law, to wave. The punishment for failing to comply is deep personal angst for days that they might have thought you were rude, which, to many British people, is worse than death).

What an American would called a kids’ size popcorn at a movie theatre (sorry, ‘cinema’) would be the largest size available in Britain.

The word ‘quite’ is often used to reduce intensity in British English rather than enhance it. In America, ‘quite’ always means ‘very’, whereas in Britain ‘quite nice’ often means ‘sort of nice’ instead of ‘extremely nice’. (I learned this the hard way three years into my time in the UK, when complimenting someone. I was told I had been inadvertently rude.)

In Britain, ‘middle class’ refers to well-off professionals such as doctors and lawyers, not the middle of the economic bell curve, as in America.

You can learn much more about a person by their accent. Accents can change even in the span of a few dozen miles. (When I first moved to the UK, I once went cycling in Wales, encountered someone on the top of a big mountain climb, and couldn’t understand a word he said. I told him I didn’t speak Welsh. It turns out he was speaking English, albeit with a Welsh valley accent. I’m sure he still tells that story about the American idiot he once met.) There is even a special accent associated with Eton, a school for posh boys. Whereas when I talk, I sound like a generic suburban Midwesterner and could conceivably be from an area with a 1,000-1,500-mile radius.

This article was originally published on Brian’s blog site – The Garden of Forking Paths.

Dr Brian Klaas is Associate Professor in Global Politics, University College London. For more from Brian visit brianpklaas.com. His book Corruptible: Who Gets Power And How It Changes Us is out now, available from Amazon.

NASA has spent seven years trying to prevent Bennu — an asteroid taller than the Empire State Building and named after ancient Egypt‘s fiery bird-god — from crashing cataclysmically into Earth.

While Bennu’s chances of impact are just 1-in-2,700, more than five times a person’s chance of being struck by lightning, NASA’s team nevertheless has categorized it as one of the two ‘most hazardous known asteroids.’

In a worst-case scenario, the roughly 510-meter wide, carbon-based behemoth would smash into Earth with 1,200 megatons of energy: 24 times the power of the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated (the Soviet Union’s ‘Tsar Bomba‘).

If it happens, Bennu’s impact would unleash its 1.2 gigaton impact 159 years from this Sunday, on September 24, 2182.

While Bennu is nowhere near the size of the dino-killing, six-mile across space rock that hit the Yucatan 66 million years ago, astronomers believe that the asteroid ‘could cause continental devastation if it became an Earth impactor.’

When NASA dispatched its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft for a rendezvous with the asteroid on September 8, 2016, part of its mission was to trail Bennu for two years from 2018 to 2020 collecting data to better calculate its future path. 

‘We improved our knowledge of Bennu’s trajectory by a factor of 20,’ Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told the journal Science.

Provided humanity lasts that long, NASA will conduct its final risk calculations on Bennu’s orbit during its next near-Earth pass in 2135 – about 47 years before its potential impact.  

‘In 2135, we’ll know for sure,’ Farnocchia said.

In the meantime, Bennu, not unlike its namesake god of creation and rebirth, also has something to tell us about the birth of our solar system.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx went to Bennu equipped with the tools to map the ancient asteroid, a sort of time capsule of the early solar system, and collect rare samples of this nearly untouched material.

This Sunday, the OSIRIS-REx will drop a payload of 8.8 ounces (250 grams) from its Bennu mission back down to Earth, as the probe skates past approximately 485 miles above our planet’s surface toward its next asteroid rendezvous mission.  

‘This is pure untainted material revealing early solar system secrets,’ astrophysicist Hakeem Oluyesi of Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory told ABC News about the samples.   

‘A longshot discovery would be finding biological molecules or even precursor molecules for life,’ according to Oluyesi.

OSIRIS-REx was not only the US space agency’s first-ever asteroid sample collection run.

It is now poised to also become the largest-ever asteroid-sampling mission, besting Japanese space agency JAXA’s collection of 5.4 grams from the asteroid Ryugu in 2020.

But OSIRIS-REx’s mission is still days away from successful completion. 

‘It feels very much like the last few miles of a marathon,’ said Rich Burns, the OSIRIS-REx project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. 

‘A confluence of emotions like pride and joy, coexisting with a determined focus to complete the race well.’

After careening across 63,000 miles of our solar system, and now hurtling towards Earth at a breakneck 28,000 mph, OSIRIS-REx will release its capsule of samples at approximately 4:42 AM Mountain Time (10:42 AM UTC) over Utah. 

The capsule, about the size of a mini-fridge and prepared to withstand friction temperatures twice as hot as molten magma, will be slowed in its descent to Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert by parachutes. 

Researchers plan to recover the samples from a pre-planned 36-mile by 8.5-mile area on the Pentagon’s Utah Test and Training Range southwest of Salt Lake City. 

Touchdown is expect at a little before 9:00 AM Mountain Time.

All the data collected by the OSIRIS-REx will help in future efforts to deflect Bennu in the event of a worst case scenario. 

But planetary scientist Lindley Johnson of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office believes such a dire case is unlikely.

‘I don’t think we need to do anything about Bennu,’ as Johnson told Science.

‘This data set [from OSIRIS-REx] will be enormously valuable in assessing deflection technologies,’ according to Johnson who believes that the nearly 50-year window between 2135 and 2182 will be plenty of time to mount an Armageddon-style deflection mission.

Nonetheless, if Bennu were to impact Earth, it would be similar to an explosion of more than 1.1 billion tons of TNT. 

Kelly Fast, program manager for the Near-Earth Object Observations Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement: ‘NASA’s Planetary Defense mission is to find and monitor asteroids and comets that can come near Earth and may pose a hazard to our planet. 

‘We carry out this endeavor through continuing astronomical surveys that collect data to discover previously unknown objects and refine our orbital models for them.

‘The OSIRIS-REx mission has provided an extraordinary opportunity to refine and test these models, helping us better predict where Bennu will be when it makes its close approach to Earth more than a century from now.’

NASA last updated its estimates of the planetary risks posed by Bennu in November 2021, with a paper entitled ‘Ephemeris and hazard assessment for near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu based on OSIRIS-REx data,’ published in the journal Icarus.  

While there is a slight chance Bennu will collide with Earth over the next three centuries, the space agency notes there is more than a 99.9 percent probability it will not. 

Back in 2020, NASA unveiled stunning videos and images showing the moment the spacecraft pulled off its six-second touch-and-go (TAG) mission where it bounced off the Bennu’s surface and picked up samples along the way.

Once completed Sunday, the triumphant $1.16 billion mission will be the first American effort to take a sample from an asteroid with the hopes to unlock secrets about the origin of life on Earth.

NASA’s October 2020 images show how the spacecraft descended within three feet of the target landing spot dubbed Nightingale on the asteroid while avoiding boulders the size of buildings. 

Upon contact, the spacecraft’s 11-foot robotic arm can then be seen smashing some porous rock upon initial impact with the surface.

A nitrogen gas bottle then fired on the surface to stir up material and suck it up in a ‘rubble shower’.

The spacecraft spent five seconds of the six seconds on Bennu collecting the material before backing away, with a majority of the sample collected in the first three seconds.

Three years later, fruits of those six seconds, a smaller safer piece of Bennu will finally collide gently with Earth. 

A former top advisor to Bill Clinton says there’s a ‘good chance’ Hillary Clinton will run against Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election if the current administration loses Congress in the midterms.

Dick Morris claimed Sunday morning a Clinton-Trump rematch is likely if the Democrats don’t pull the successful results in November’s election, alleging the failure would cause the party to turn on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. 

‘There’s a good chance of it,’ Morris told WABC radio host John Catsimatidis before applauding the former presidential nominee’s campaign strategy, which could see her face-off against Donald Trump again after Trump beat her to the White House in 2016. 

‘Hillary has set up a brilliant, brilliant strategy that nobody else is able to do.’

He continued: ‘What she’s done — at a point at which no Democrat is willing to come out and criticize Joe Biden, but all Democrats are disappointed with him and have to realize the ultimate correctness of our accusations that he was incompetent to be president — she has set up a zero-sum gain with him. 

‘The worse he does, the better she does because she’s positioned herself as the Democratic alternative to Biden.’

Morris also claimed Clinton, 74, has portrayed herself as the opposition to the extreme left and cautioned her own party to be cognizant of the candidates they’re running in what she refers to as ‘purple districts’. 

That appears to be an attack on ‘woke’ progressive policies that have been blamed for turning many centrist Dems away from the party. 

The former political advisor alleged ‘there is only one person capable of that level of thinking — and that’s her husband, Bill.’

Although Clinton has not yet said if she intends to enter the bid for president in 2024, she has publicly taken aim at the current administration’s efforts, saying they ‘mean nothing if we don’t have a Congress that will get things done and we don’t have a White House that we can count on to be sane and sober and stable and productive’.

Morris alleged Clinton is well positioned to be the Democratic party’s change candidate who can reference Biden’s failures, noting that a ‘left-wing took over the party and led us into disaster in the 2022 midterms’.

‘The person who staked out the turf first and owns the turf in the Democratic Party is going to be Hillary. It’s a brilliant, brilliant strategy​,’ he explained. 

His comments come just weeks after Clinton warned the Democratic Party it needs to be ‘clear eyed’ about what wins elections – a tacit warning that its progressive wing risks handing midterm victories to the Republican Party. 

She told NBC‘s Willie Geist last month that Democrats needed candidates who could win in purple states if it was to have a Congress that will ‘get things done.’

Her comments reflect divisions in both parties, as centrists grapple with fringes that offer ideological purity and headline generating Twitter accounts. 

For Democrats, that means the so-called Squad of progressives – including the likes of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.   

‘I think that it is a time for some careful thinking about what wins elections, and not just in deep blue districts where a democrat and a liberal Democrat or so-called progressive Democrat is going to win,’ said Clinton.  

‘We’ve got to be very clear eyed about what it’s going to take to hold the House and the Senate in 2022. And to win the electoral college because also Republicans are doing everything they can to create an environment in which winning the Electoral College, even narrowly the way Joe Biden did will be out of reach for Democrats,’ she argued in December, just weeks after the party’s defeat in Virginia’s gubernatorial election.

She added that she understood why politicians would want to argue for their own priorities. 

‘But at the end of the day, nothing is going to get done if you don’t have a Democratic majority in the House, in the Senate, and our majority comes from people who win in much more difficult districts and our majority in the Senate comes from people who can win in not just blue states and hold those wins … but can win in more purpleish states,’ she said. 

‘So this is going to be a very intense period, not just for the Democratic Party, but for the country.’ 

Morris, referencing her commentary, said Sunday: ‘She was absolutely right and nobody else has the guts to say that.’

He alleged other Democrats had to keep their alliance with the extreme left because ‘that’s their potential base’.

‘Hillary can say “go to hell, I don’t care about you guys. I’m going to be the anti-Chirst, I’m going to run against you.” Therefore, she’s the only one between now and the end of the midterm elections who’s prepared to say what the truth is,’ Morris said.

He added: ‘She staked out a ground, not on ideological issues, but on pragmatism.’ 

Morris’ statements echo those made last week in a Wall Street Journal op-ed making a case for a Clinton 2024 run.

The authors cited Biden and Harris’ poor poll numbers, alleging they could open doors for the former Secretary of State.

‘She is already in an advantageous position to become the 2024 Democratic nominee,’ Democratic political consultant Doug Schoen and former New York City Council president Andrew Stein wrote. 

‘She is an experienced national figure who is younger than Mr. Biden and can offer a different approach from the disorganized and unpopular one the party is currently taking.’ 

However, others argue Clinton isn’t ‘forward-thinking’ enough to secure a bid for the 2024 race.

‘Democrats have a rich history of bringing old-school politicians out of the stables for a comeback and having them get slaughtered,’ Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Campaign Change Committee, told The Hill Sunday.

‘Not just Hillary Clinton in 2016 but Senate candidates like Ted Strickland in Ohio, Russ Feingold in Wisconsin, Phil Bredesen in Tennessee and Walter Mondale in Minnesota.’

‘We need forward-looking leaders who stand for a new vision and not the politics of yesteryear that everybody hates,’ he added. 

Although Clinton has not formally stated if she plans to run for president in 2024, a source close to the former First Lady and her husband claims the couple wants to return to prominence in the Democratic Party.

‘It’s a perpetual itch that will never go away,’ the insider told Politico. ‘They know how to slowly reenter. The Clintons want to reset the board in their favor and then move the pieces.

Trump also hasn’t announced if he plans to run 2024, but he has publicly said he’s thinking about it.’

‘I think a lot of people will be very happy, frankly, with the decision, and probably will announce that after the midterms,’ he said in an interview in November.

Recent polls have shown he is favored above other potential Republican candidates.

In a Reuters survey published last month, 54 percent of Republicans said they would pick Trump as their top choice. Eleven percent indicated they favored Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. 

Hundreds of women could benefit from an ovarian cancer drug pairing that doubles the chance of remission

•  Low-grade serious ovarian cancer disproportionately affects younger women
•  Condition is notoriously difficult to detect and there are few treatment options
•  Researchers saw tumours shrink in half after prescribing new drug combination

By Kate Pickles For The Mail On Sunday

Updated: 20:19 EDT, 3 June 2023

Elon Musk is one of the most prominent names and faces in developing technologies. 

The billionaire entrepreneur heads up SpaceX, Tesla and the Boring company. 

But while he is on the forefront of creating AI technologies, he is also acutely aware of its dangers. 

Here is a comprehensive timeline of all Musk’s premonitions, thoughts and warnings about AI, so far.   

August 2014 – ‘We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.’ 

October 2014 – ‘I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence.’

October 2014 – ‘With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.’ 

June 2016 – ‘The benign situation with ultra-intelligent AI is that we would be so far below in intelligence we’d be like a pet, or a house cat.’

July 2017 – ‘I think AI is something that is risky at the civilisation level, not merely at the individual risk level, and that’s why it really demands a lot of safety research.’ 

July 2017 – ‘I have exposure to the very most cutting-edge AI and I think people should be really concerned about it.’

July 2017 – ‘I keep sounding the alarm bell but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react because it seems so ethereal.’

August 2017 –  ‘If you’re not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea.’

November 2017 – ‘Maybe there’s a five to 10 percent chance of success [of making AI safe].’

March 2018 – ‘AI is much more dangerous than nukes. So why do we have no regulatory oversight?’ 

April 2018 – ‘[AI is] a very important subject. It’s going to affect our lives in ways we can’t even imagine right now.’

April 2018 – ‘[We could create] an immortal dictator from which we would never escape.’ 

November 2018 – ‘Maybe AI will make me follow it, laugh like a demon & say who’s the pet now.’

September 2019 – ‘If advanced AI (beyond basic bots) hasn’t been applied to manipulate social media, it won’t be long before it is.’

February 2020 – ‘At Tesla, using AI to solve self-driving isn’t just icing on the cake, it the cake.’

July 2020 – ‘We’re headed toward a situation where AI is vastly smarter than humans and I think that time frame is less than five years from now. But that doesn’t mean that everything goes to hell in five years. It just means that things get unstable or weird.’ 

April 2021: ‘A major part of real-world AI has to be solved to make unsupervised, generalized full self-driving work.’

February 2022: ‘We have to solve a huge part of AI just to make cars drive themselves.’ 

December 2022: ‘The danger of training AI to be woke – in other words, lie – is deadly.’ 

Millions across the world are being warned to brace themselves, as a damning new report claims the hottest year on record will take place by 2027.

Experts stressed with 98 per cent certainty that a global temperature spike will take place in the next five years. 

The bleak news comes amid worsening climate change fears and follows a summer of hell in Europe, which faced its second hottest year recorded in 2022. 

Future extremes also have a two-in-three chance of exceeding 2.7°F (1.5°C) above pre-industrial levels – breaking promises of the climate-focused Paris Agreement.

‘Today’s report shows that the next five years are expected to bring new temperature records,’ said Dr Leon Hermanson, a Met Office scientist behind the report.

‘These new highs will be fuelled almost completely by the rise of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but the anticipated development of the naturally-occurring El Niño event will also release heat from the tropical Pacific.’ 

El Niño is a reoccurring warming phase that takes place across the tropical Pacific following a La Niña cooling phase.

These periods shift back and forth irregularly every two to seven years, triggering rainfall and temperature changes.

The ocean’s La Niña phase ended in March this year, with El Niño expected to take ahold during the coming months. 

This natural phenomenon combined with the emission of gases such as carbon dioxide are likely to worsen temperature highs from as soon as next year.

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) anticipates that rainfall surges will be experienced across the Sahel region of Africa, northern Europe, Alaska and Siberia as a result.

Rainfall is also likely to plummet across the Amazon and parts of Australia during the same time period of 2023 to 2027. 

Meanwhile, Arctic heating is predicted to be more than three times higher than the global average, amidst fears of worsening ice sheet melt. 

Over the five years, temperatures are predicted to be between 1.98°F (1.1°C) and 3.24°F (1.8°C) higher than the 1850-1900 average – a slippery slope towards breaking the Paris Agreement.

This legally binding climate change treaty came into force in 2016, seeking to limit the temperature increase to 2.7°F (1.5°C) above pre-industrial levels.

A total of 196 countries have signed this, including the US which initially refused due to Donald Trump’s disapproval. 

Yet, the WMO believes that even if Paris levels are exceeded, this does not have to be a permanent change.

Secretary-General Professor Petteri Taalas said: ‘This report does not mean that we will permanently exceed the 1.5°C level specified in the Paris Agreement which refers to long-term warming over many years.

‘However, WMO is sounding the alarm that we will breach the 1.5°C level on a temporary basis with increasing frequency.’

The bleak report follows other research showing that Europe endured its hottest summer on record in 2022.

Extreme heatwaves and drought gripped hold of the continent during this time, which are only expected to worsen.

Summer wildfires also generated the highest carbon emissions in 15 years — leading to a record melt of Alpine glaciers as five cubic kilometers of ice disappeared. 

Director of C3S, Carlo Buontempo, warned these figures were ‘alarming’ but crucial to understanding how we can better cope with the impacts of climate change.

He said: ‘The report highlights alarming changes to our climate, including the hottest summer ever recorded in Europe, marked by unprecedented marine heatwaves in the Mediterranean Sea and record-breaking temperatures in Greenland.

‘Understanding the climate dynamics in Europe is crucial for our efforts to adapt and mitigate the negative impacts climate change has on the continent.’