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Camels at beauty pageant disqualified after using hump-plumping injectables Camel owners had used injections to enhance the camel’s lips, dermal fillers around their noses and silicone wax to enlarge the humps

An injectable filler scandal has hit a beauty pageant... for camels. @Independent reports that 20 competitors in the 2026 Camel Beauty Show in Oman received filler injections for their lips, nose and humps, as well as Botox in their faces.

https://flip.it/Q5hxt8

#Lifestyle #Beauty #Animals

Bernard LaFayette, Selma voting rights organizer, dies at 85 Voting rights organizer Bernard LaFayette has died. LaFayette's son says his father died Thursday morning of a heart attack. He was 85.

Bernard LaFayette, a civil rights activist and key figure in the voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, has died at age 85. Here's more from @AssociatedPress.

https://flip.it/TK1wA_

#RIP #InMemoriam #BlackMastodon #BlackHistory #BernardLaFayette

🎉 🎉 🎉

Welcome to Bluesky at last, Cory Doctorow! @doctorow.pluralistic.net

Trump fires Homeland Security Secretary Noem after building criticism over immigration enforcement President Donald Trump has fired his embattled Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and says he'll nominate in her place Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin.

Kristi Noem out as Homeland Security Secretary. President Trump to nominate Sen. Markwayne Mullin as replacement. @AssociatedPress reports:

https://flip.it/Izla4r

#News #USNews #Politics #Trump #Noem #DHS

Russia is big winner as Iran war drains supplies needed by Ukraine and sends oil prices higher.

From @WSJ: "The U.S. military confrontation with Iran is depleting Patriot interceptor stocks, which Ukraine needs to defend against Russia."

Gift link: https://flip.it/V56nsw

#Ukraine #Russia […]

All the New Science Fiction Books Arriving in March 2026 - Reactor This March will see sentient spaceships, psychic space monsters, humans and spiders working together, and more…

Sentient spaceships, spiders and psychic space monsters, oh my. Here's Reactor with all the new science fiction books being published this month.

https://flip.it/5BJbOZ

#Books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #SciFi

* * * * * * * Many Democrats have claimed that President Donald Trump didn’t have the legal authority to unilaterally order the Feb. 28 joint military airstrikes with Israel that resulted in the death of the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Experts have told us that, according to an originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, congressional approval for the use of military force against another country is required. Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution gives the power “To declare War” to Congress. However, in practice, several presidents have unilaterally ordered military action abroad without authorization from Congress. In this story, we’ll look at what Democrats have said about Trump’s latest military order and review what experts already told us in similar past cases. ## Claims of Illegality Not long after the attack on Saturday, several Democrats were quick to criticize Trump’s military operation in official statements or media appearances. Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona said in a Feb. 28 statement on his congressional website, “President Trump promised no more forever wars. Instead, he has illegally dragged us into another one without congressional authorization and no long term strategy.” Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia called it an “illegal war” on “Fox News Sunday” on March 1. “The Constitution says no declaration of war without Congress,” he said. “The president has called this war against Iran. The president can act to imminently defend the United States against imminent attack, if that happens, without congressional approval, needing later ratification by Congress. But if you’re going to initiate war, you need Congress. The president not only did not come to Congress to seek a debate or vote, he acted without even notification to the vast majority of us.” That same day, on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut also called Trump’s actions “illegal” without authorization. “Congress wouldn’t vote to give him the permission to do it, but he’s obligated to come to Congress,” Murphy said. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that members of Congress were informed consistent with current law. “We notified Congress,” Rubio told reporters in a March 2 press gaggle. “I mean, we notified the Gang of Eight. We notified congressional leadership. There’s no law that requires us to do that. The law says we have to notify them 48 hours after beginning hostilities. We’ve done that.” The Gang of Eight refers to a special group of eight members of Congress, including the four top Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate, as well as the chairperson and ranking member of the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on X that, prior to the attacks, Rubio “called all members of the gang of eight to provide congressional notification, and he was able to reach and brief seven of the eight members.” Rubio said there was no legal requirement to notify all members of Congress at that time. ## Expert Opinion We previously examined the legality of unilateral uses of military force by presidents when the U.S. bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities in June, and again when the U.S. carried out the military operation in Venezuela that led to the capture of that country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in January. One of the experts we quoted in our January story, Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale Law School, was definitive in her assessment of the latest use of military force abroad. “The strikes on Iran are blatantly illegal,” she wrote in an X post on Feb. 28. “I explained in June why the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities were unlawful under US and international law. Everything I wrote then is true today, but this is a far larger assault with far graver consequences.” In her guest essay for the New York Times last year, Hathaway wrote, “It has become almost quaint to observe that the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. Yes, the president is commander in chief of the military, but he is obligated to seek authorization from Congress before he initiates a war.” An Iranian flag is planted in the rubble of a police station, damaged in airstrikes on March 3 in Tehran. Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images. Hathaway said the only time that a president does not need advance congressional approval “is when the United States has been attacked and he must act quickly to protect the country.” She said the president is also “required to seek authorization from the United Nations Security Council,” since the U.S. long ago signed on to a U.N. Charter that prohibits unjustified uses of military force by one country against another. But other legal experts have told us that the issue of legality isn’t so clear. Peter Shane, a constitutional law scholar and adjunct professor at New York University School of Law, told us in June that it is “difficult to give a definitive answer” on the constitutionality of such military actions “because there is so much disagreement about how the Constitution should be interpreted with regard to the unilateral presidential deployment of military force.” In an email, he said, “Under the most persuasive reading of the Founding era, the Constitution does not authorize Presidents to deploy military force abroad without advance congressional authorization.” But he added that it has “long been the position” of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel “that history has ratified unilateral presidential deployments of military force as long as (1) the deployment serves ‘sufficiently important national interests,’ as judged by the President, and (2) the deployment does not portend a ‘prolonged and substantial military engagement, typically involving exposure of U.S. military personnel to significant risk over a substantial period.’” Kermit Roosevelt, a constitutional expert and professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, made similar points to us for our June story. “The Constitution says that Congress has the power to declare war, and the records of the Constitutional Convention are pretty clear that the drafters did not want to give one person the power to take the United States into war,” Roosevelt told us in an email. “However, presidents have done things that count as acts of war under international law without congressional authorization, like the Libya bombings [under then-President Barack Obama], and no one has stopped them, so our practice has departed from the text and original understanding.” As for when Congress has to be notified of military action, the Congressional Research Service has explained that the 1973 War Powers Resolution passed by Congress requires presidents within 48 hours “to report to Congress any introduction of U.S. forces into hostilities or imminent hostilities.” After the military action is reported, the resolution “requires that the use of forces must be terminated within 60 to 90 days unless Congress authorizes such use or extends the time period.” It also “requires that the ‘President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing’ U.S. Armed Forces into hostilities or imminent hostilities.” Roosevelt told us that the resolution should not be interpreted to mean the president “can do what he wants for 48 hours before notifying Congress, or for 60 days even if Congress doesn’t” grant its approval. He said, “That’s not consistent with the Constitution and it’s not consistent with the purpose and policy section of the WPA, which says that the intent is to make sure that the President’s power to engage in military action is exercised ‘only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.’” The “48 hour and 60 day windows are supposed to be relevant to presidential _responses_ to attacks, and the President is not supposed to be able to _initiat_ e wars at all,” he explained, with emphasis. On March 2, Trump sent a report informing Congress that the strikes he authorized against Iran “were undertaken to protect United States forces in the region, protect the United States homeland, advance vital United States national interests, including ensuring the free flow of maritime commerce through the Strait of Hormuz, and in collective self-defense of our regional allies, including Israel.” The president said he “acted pursuant to my constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive to conduct United States foreign relations.” ## An ‘Empty’ Debate Since earlier this year, Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has been saying that the debate among experts about the legality of unilateral presidential uses of force is largely meaningless. “Immediately after these operations happen, every time this happens – Libya, Kosovo, Iran, all of these unilateral uses of force without congressional authorization – we immediately jump to the law and commentators immediately say this is illegal, depending on whether they like the war or not, or they defend it as being lawful, and we have this debate about whether it’s lawful or not, and I frankly think it’s kind of a meaningless debate in almost every circumstance,” he said in a Jan. 5 online discussion with another legal scholar, Bob Bauer, a New York University School of Law professor of practice. Goldsmith said the question is why has Congress ceded the power to use military force to the president without restrictions. He made the same points in a Feb. 28 analysis after the U.S-Israel attack on Iran. “As I’ve been saying for a while, there are no effective legal limitations within the executive branch. And courts have never gotten involved in articulating constraints in this context. That leaves Congress and the American people,” he wrote. “They have occasionally risen up to constrain the president’s deployment of troops and uses of force—for example, in Vietnam, and in Lebanon in 1983, and in Somalia in 1993. But those actions are rare and tend only to happen once there is disaster.” He said “rhetoric of legal constraint, and debates about the legality of presidential uses of force, are empty,” and “deflect attention from Congress’s constitutional responsibility to exercise its political judgment and the political powers that the framers undoubtedly gave it to question, to hold to account, and (should it so choose) to constrain presidential uses of force.” Congress may vote this week on war powers resolutions drafted by members of the House and Senate, including Republican Rep. Thomas Massie and Republican Sen. Rand Paul, both of Kentucky. The resolutions would require congressional approval before any further military action in Iran is taken. Trump could veto a passed resolution, and if that happens, there may not be enough support in Congress to override the veto. Few Republicans have indicated support for a war powers resolution. Last June, the Senate failed to pass a war powers resolution that was introduced after the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities. Then in January, the House and Senate failed to pass a resolution after the military raid in Venezuela. Trump told the New York Times that the U.S-Israel attacks on Iran could go on for “four to five weeks.” * * * _Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made throughour “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. _

Is the U.S. military campaign against Iran legal? FactCheck.org explores the question.

https://flip.it/T.oqyn

#Iran #FactCheck #News #War

Polymarket Pulls Nuclear Detonation Market Following Public Backlash - Decrypt War betting, insider trading accusations, and a list of overseas bans are piling pressure on the prediction market giant.

Polymarket has pulled its nuclear detonation market. The "Nuclear weapon detonation by..." event attracted major trading activity on the platform, but widespread backlash across social media. Here's more from Decrypt.

https://flip.it/URUY0k

#Polymarket #Betting #Iran

This year, Harvard student organizers have struggled to secure funding for #BlackHistoryMonth events. @rosesbloom24.bsky.social shared this @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social story explaining the situation. Discover more stories in our @surf.social Black history feed.

📌 bsky.app/profile/flip...

The rumors are true 👀

We did create a World Baseball Classic feed on @surf.social and it is available on Bluesky.

Why was there confusion around voting in Dallas County and Williamson County, Texas? @votebeat.org breaks it down. Follow their #TexasPrimaries feed here or on Surf (via Discover Feeds in your sidebar) for the latest.

📌 bsky.app/profile/vote...

Amazing — congratulations team @ghost.org!

Today @ghost.org crossed $10M ARR, as a bootstrapped non-profit foundation building open source software.

Indie publisher revenue earned with Ghost now ~$130M, and accelerating.

As vital as vaccines are, they can be frustratingly selective about their targets. Scientists from institutions across the US have now developed a strikingly "universal" vaccine, which has protected mice against a range of viruses, bacteria, and even allergies. The new GLA-3M-052-LS+OVA vaccine can be delivered as a nasal spray. Three doses protected mice from infection from SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses for three months, and reduced the viral load in their lungs 700-fold, compared to unvaccinated mice. The vaccine also accelerated the mice's immune response to SARS-CoV-2. While their lungs' adaptive immune systems typically take up to two weeks to respond to the virus, those with the vaccine took as little as three days to launch a counter-attack. In follow-up tests, the vaccine was also found to protect the animals against bacterial infections. That included _Staphylococcus aureus_ and _Acinetobacter baumannii_, both of which are often acquired in hospital settings and are becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics. Most surprisingly, the vaccine also cut the risk of asthma. When vaccinated mice were exposed to dust mites, their asthmatic responses, such as increased immune cell production and excess lung mucus, were reduced for three months as well. "I think what we have is a universal vaccine against diverse respiratory threats," says Bali Pulendran, microbiologist at Stanford and senior author of the study. "Imagine getting a nasal spray in the fall months that protects you from all respiratory viruses, including COVID-19, influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, and the common cold, as well as bacterial pneumonia and early spring allergens. That would transform medical practice." frameborder="0″ allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen> Most vaccines work by presenting the immune system with a harmless fragment of a pathogen, allowing the body to prepare an arsenal of targeted antibodies to fight off the real thing if it ever appears. This is working on what's known as adaptive immunity. It's been a lifesaving strategy for centuries, but vaccines are frustratingly specific. Those fragments not only differ between pathogens, but often even between strains. That's why flu vaccines are updated every year, with varying efficacy rates. Other so-called 'universal' vaccines generally target the same family of viruses, such as influenza. But including completely different pathogens, like bacteria and even allergens, gives new meaning to the word. This new vaccine works on a different mechanism. Rather than target the pathogen itself, it focuses on the body's response. Essentially, it's designed to link the two main arms of the immune system: The long-lasting but specific adaptive immunity that most vaccines work on, and the short-lived but diverse innate immunity. The latter is our first line of defense against unfamiliar threats, but it generally wanes after a few days as the adaptive immune system learns to fight off the pathogen. In previous work, researchers learned why a common tuberculosis vaccine induced a surprisingly long-lasting innate response. It turns out that T cells – part of the adaptive response – were rallying innate immune cells and keeping them active for several months. After isolating the T cells' critical signals, the team has now found that they can mimic their call-to-arms synthetically to keep the innate immunity going long after it normally would and help bestow a kind of universal immunity. The next steps are human trials, and the team hopes that if research continues, this kind of universal vaccine could be available within five to seven years. **Related:'Universal' Cancer Vaccine Destroys Resistant Tumors in Mice** "Whilst exciting, there are still big steps to take before a truly universal vaccine becomes a reality," says Jonathan Ball, molecular virologist at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the UK, who wasn't involved in the study. "The key questions are: will it work as effectively in humans, and is it safe? We already see 'off-target' protection in people who receive certain vaccines, suggesting the potential is real. However, we have to ensure that keeping the body on 'high alert' doesn't lead to friendly fire, where a hyper-ready immune system accidentally triggers unwelcomed side-effects." The research was published in the journal _Science_.

Scientists from institutions across the U.S. have now developed a strikingly "universal" vaccine, which has protected mice against a range of viruses, bacteria, and even allergies.

@ScienceAlert reports: https://flip.it/GoWAFW

#Vaccines #Medicine #Science #Health #Disease

How Texas state Rep. James Talarico won over Latino voters and beat Jasmine Crockett in Democratic Senate primary.

@WSJ reports the candidate's "message of religious faith and economic populism resonated with Hispanic voters whom Democrats hope to pull back from Trump."

Gift link […]

Just a few minutes before we get started (though of course we won't know much for a while after).

Open and bookmark this page to know what to follow (and to check the results as they're finalized), but otherwise... get some food and drink, and stay on my feed!

What is the St. Paul Jacket? @usefulnoise.bsky.social wrote this explainer for @racketmn.com, and @derzquist.net created a Surf feed (published to @bsky.app) for all your St. Paul Jacket news.

📌 bsky.app/profile/derz...

A screenshot of the Surf app showing the Trending Feeds section, in which Votebeat's Texas Primaries feed is featured.

Texas selects nominees for many statewide and district-based seats tonight, but the big story is the two Senate primaries. Get all the latest from @votebeat.org's feed, now featured on Surf (hit Discover Feeds in your sidebar to find it) and here on @bsky.app.

bsky.app/profile/vote...

Europe is building a federated cloud and AI infrastructure to end its dependence on the U.S. and China. Here's more from @euronews.

https://flip.it/ZfJK6a

#Technology #Tech #Europe

A "Game of Thrones" movie is in the works at Warner Bros., @THR reports. Here's everything we know so far, from the vision, to who they've picked to write it.

https://flip.it/i9nBvb

#Movies #Cinema #Film #GameOfThrones

Live updates: Texas, North Carolina primary election news | CNN Politics Today’s primaries kick off an eight-month marathon to the midterms, delivering a verdict on President Donald Trump’s second term. Follow here for the latest.

The 2026 election season in the U.S. gets underway with primaries today in Texas, North Carolina and Arkansas.

@CNN has a live blog with the latest news: https://flip.it/y8lVGV

#USPolitics #Elections #Politics #News #Primaries

Iran strikes the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia as war expands yet again.

@AssociatedPress reports: "The U.S. and Israel battered Iran with airstrikes in what President Donald Trump suggested was just the start of a war that has severely disrupted the world’s supply of oil and gas, international […]

Today’s top tech story covers an update on OpenAI’s Pentagon contract following canceled ChatGPT subscriptions that saw Anthropic take the top spot in Apple's App Store.

https://flip.it/gpkuvb

Check out more stories like this in our Top Stories in Tech Magazine, curated daily by human editors. […]

With Iran War, Kalshi and Polymarket Bet That the Depravity Economy Has No Bottom Gambling markets have conveniently found a stance that allows them to continue to profit from death and war.

People have spent millions gambling on politics and geopolitics via sites like Kalshi and Polymarket — so they're essentially profiting from death and war. @jasonkoebler calls this the "depravity economy." Here's his story for @404mediaco.

https://flip.it/.y8Pv6

#Iran #Kalshi #Polymarket #Betting

March 8 will be the last time most residents of British Columbia have to change their clocks. Premier David Eby says the province is permanently adopting daylight time. Here's more from @cbcnews.

https://flip.it/vwssme

#Canada #BritishColumbia #CanadianNews #DaylightSavingTime

What time is the blood moon total lunar eclipse tonight? A total lunar eclipse will turn the moon blood red for billions across North America, Australia and East Asia.

Skywatchers across North America, Australia and Asia will be in for a treat in the dark hours of March 3 — a total lunar eclipse. @Space.com@flipboard.com has a list of the best viewing times:

https://flip.it/EnuJlg

#Science #Space #TotalEclipse #BloodRedMoon

For up-to-the-minute coverage of tomorrow's elections, follow @taniel.bsky.social. He's the editor-in-chief of @boltsmag.org, which you can also follow on Flipboard and in the fediverse:

flipboard.com/@boltsmag

What are Meta glasses really recording? The Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet reports on data annotators in Nairobi, Kenya. They're the manual laborers of AI, whose job is to make smart glasses more "intelligent" by visually checking images, They're seeing more than they want to, from bank […]

How did Trump shift from the “no-war” president to escalating the number of military strikes beyond his modern predecessors?

Read up on this story posted by @peterbakernyt.bsky.social in Flipboard's News Takes custom feed, created with @surf.social.

📰 📌 bsky.app/profile/flip...