‘In a story that will make your beak drop, a Canadian woman has received a series of ‘thank you’ presents from a whole murder of crows after she took the time to rescue one from a gutter.

As Leah Wilson walks down the street, the superstitious among the neighbors might draw their blinds. Her steps herald the beating of black wings, as the carrion birds follow her every move.

But Wilson is no witch, she’s a hero to their clan after she came to the rescue of a young crow who was stuck inside the roof gutter of a nearby house.

Wilson, a member of the Métis indigenous peoples, knew she had to do something, and as it just so happened there was a fire truck parked nearby.

“I was like, ‘Hey! You look like you want to save a crow today,’” Leah recalls to CTV with a laugh. The firefighters agreed, and brought the ladder over to reach the crow. Once the animal was free, they left it up to Wilson to take it to the wildlife veterinarian.

That’s just what she did, and the crow assured her it would never forget.

“He latched on to my finger and held on, that was life-changing,” she said, without knowing just how life-changing it would be. “I was going for a walk with my dog, [and] a crow flew down and dropped this beautiful, feathered bundle at my feet.”

That was the first of several little “thank you gifts” she received from the local murder.

Today, she is as described above: a crow-friend, and every time she goes out for a walk, the animals circle around her in what she described as the “highlight” of her day.

The best part is when the crow she rescued comes to say hi. He’s easy enough to spot thanks to the band on his leg from when he was released back into the wild….’ (Andy Corbley via Good News Network)

‘Trump’s name has been removed from the Kennedy Center after a court ruling, but adorns many other things and places….’ (via Flipboard)

‘Coming nearly half a century after “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Disclosure Day” is a grand bookend for one of the most cosmically-minded moviemakers of our time, whose dreams of extraterrestrial life have shaped all of ours. It’s a distant answer to the final notes of “Close Encounters.” But while Spielberg grants his 1977 film was “speculative,” “Disclosure Day,” he insists, is the real deal.

“It’s my first film that will be considered science fiction that I do not consider to be science fiction,” Spielberg said in a recent interview. “It’s much more reflective of the world as it is evolving and discoveries that are being made as we speak.”

Spielberg, at 79, is trying to revive and reconsider the alien wonder that’s long lingered in his mind, from “E.T.” to “War of the Worlds.” “Disclosure Day,” Spielberg’s first summer movie in a decade, is already being hailed as one of his best in years. But this time, Spielberg is testing whether he can conjure some of his trademark movie magic less with imagination than with conviction.

“I’ve been a believer since I made ‘Close Encounters’ 50 years ago,” Spielberg says. “But I would always say: Until I’ve seen a UAP or a UFO with my own eyes, I’m not going to categorically state that life from out there has come here.

“But I’ve changed that,” he adds. “I’m now willing to change my mind because of the circumstantial evidence which is overwhelming.”…’ (Jake Coyle  via ABC News)

‘Dr. Iñaki Echeverría-Huarte is a professor of applied physics at the University of Navarra in Spain. He asked 573 people assembled in a schoolyard to roam randomly through the space. Within a few seconds, 80% of them were moving in a counterclockwise direction.

Was this because of a perceived group preference? No. Dr. Echeverría-Huarte performed the test on solitary participants, and about 75% of them moved counterclockwise. This trend persisted across 40 experiments.

A recent article in the New York Times explores the phenomenon and its potential causes. It’s clear that left or right-handedness does not correlate with this movement. Nor is it socially conditioned, as young children strongly exhibit counterclockwise movement as well as adults.

Whatever might be the root cause the movement, it will be helpful for architects and other professions that make use of crowd dynamics. I occasionally visit the largest convenience store in the world, which is a masterpiece of architecture designed for crowd movement. An awareness of the counterclockwise tendency could optimize such designs….’ (John Farrier via Neatorama)

‘A Biden-appointed federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore exhibits and other materials at national parks that highlighted slavery, climate change and other leftist ideology after they were removed under a directive targeting displays deemed disparaging to America.

U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley in Massachusetts, appointed to the federal bench by former President Joe Biden in 2021, issued a preliminary injunction Friday requiring the administration to reverse the changes and pause any further removals amid legal challenges.

The move comes amid the America 250 celebrations that will crescendo on July 4.

The Interior Department in a statement called Kelley a “liberal activist judge” and said it was reviewing its options to appeal its removal of what Secretary Doug Burgum rebuked as “improper partisan ideology.”…’ (Eric Mack via Fox News)

‘”We’re afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded,” an administration source told us. “And we have no idea which ones.” Verbatim accounts of several Situation Room meetings were included in excerpts about the Iran war and the Epstein files that The Times posted ahead of the book’s June 23 publication.

The authors conducted more than 1,000 interviews for “Regime Change,” which covers Trump’s second term. Tellingly, White House officials haven’t disputed verbatim dialogue from the top-secret Sit Room talks, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying about Bibi’s regime-change scenarios for Iran: “In other words, it’s bullshit.”

We hear President Trump is furious about the blow-by-blow accounts. Haberman and Swan refused to comment.

Reality check: Haberman and Swan didn’t need audio recordings. Bob Woodward pioneered contemporary historical political journalism by including dialogue in his books that was reconstructed from the memories of people in the rooms where things happened….’ (Jim VandeHei via Axios)

‘Sometimes it feels like a glaring design flaw that we have to power down for six to nine hours a day just to keep the brain from frying. Now, according to a new study published in Nature Neuroscience, scientists may have found a way to give us all the benefits of sleep without actually going to sleep….’ ([object Object] via Vice)

Researchers recreated a deep-sleep brain rhythm in mice that remained fully awake and mobile. Mice that stayed awake while receiving the artificial sleep rhythm performed as well as fully rested mice, and molecular markers in their brains mirrored changes typically seen after natural sleep.

The investigators emphasized that this is not a practical shortcut for avoiding sleep. The method required genetic engineering and implanted brain electrodes, and natural sleep appears to restore the brain more evenly across regions.

Even so, the findings strikingly identify a specific electrical signal associated with restorative sleep and show that at least some benefits of sleep can be approximated by artificially reproducing that rhythm.

‘What if some black holes aren’t black holes at all? A new theoretical study suggests that when a massive star collapses, it might not form a singularity hidden behind an event horizon. Instead, the collapse could trigger the birth of a tiny new universe inside the dying star. Driven by dark energy, this miniature cosmos would expand and push back against gravity, preventing complete collapse and creating an exotic object known as a gravastar….’ (via ScienceDaily)

‘What Trump and his “manosphere” are trying to tell us with their public displays of testosterone…’ (Robert Reich)