Amazon forest felled to build road for climate summit

A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém.

It aims to ease traffic to the city, which will host more than 50,000 people - including world leaders - at the conference in November.

The state government touts the highway's "sustainable" credentials, but some locals and conservationists are outraged at the environmental impact.

The Amazon plays a vital role in absorbing carbon for the world and providing biodiversity, and many say this deforestation contradicts the very purpose of a climate summit.

Along the partially built road, lush rainforest towers on either side - a reminder of what was once there. Logs are piled high in the cleared land which stretches more than 13km (8 miles) through the rainforest into Belém.

Diggers and machines carve through the forest floor, paving over wetland to surface the road which will cut through a protected area.

Claudio Verequete lives about 200m from where the road will be. He used to make an income from harvesting açaí berries from trees that once occupied the space.

"Everything was destroyed," he says, gesturing at the clearing.

"Our harvest has already been cut down. We no longer have that income to support our family."

He says he has received no compensation from the state government and is currently relying on savings.

He worries the construction of this road will lead to more deforestation in the future, now that the area is more accessible for businesses.

"Our fear is that one day someone will come here and say: 'Here's some money. We need this area to build a gas station, or to build a warehouse.' And then we'll have to leave.

"We were born and raised here in the community. Where are we going to go?"

Nice timing. The US Environmental Protection Agency just (https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/nx-s1-5326354/trump-epa-environmental-rules-rollback-deregulation) announced yesterday that they're eliminating basically every climate regulation, or as the self-described EPA-destroyer who was put in charge of the EPA said, "We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion".

In a peer-reviewed paper, a scientist says he has mathematically proven the physical feasibility of a specific kind of time travel. The paper appears in Classical and Quantum Gravity.

Germain Tobar and Fabio Costa, both of the University of Queensland at the time of the paper’s publication, worked together on the study. In “Reversible dynamics with closed time-like curves and freedom of choice,” Tobar and Costa say they found a middle ground in mathematics that solves a major logical paradox in one model of time travel. Let’s dig in.

The math itself is complex, but it boils down to something fairly simple. Time travel discussion focuses on closed time-like curves (CTCs), something Albert Einstein first posited. And Tobar and Costa say that as long as just two pieces of an entire scenario within a CTC are still in “causal order” when you leave, the rest is subject to local free will.

“Our results show that CTCs are not only compatible with determinism and with the local 'free choice' of operations, but also with a rich and diverse range of scenarios and dynamical processes,” their paper concludes.

“Say you travelled in time, in an attempt to stop COVID-19's patient zero from being exposed to the virus. However if you stopped that individual from becoming infected, that would eliminate the motivation for you to go back and stop the pandemic in the first place. This is a paradox, an inconsistency that often leads people to think that time travel cannot occur in our universe. [L]ogically it's hard to accept because that would affect our freedom to make any arbitrary action. It would mean you can time travel, but you cannot do anything that would cause a paradox to occur."

EAST HANOVER, NJ—As part of the health secretary's highly publicized pledge to determine the cause of the disorder in the next five months, a wild-eyed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reportedly shouted “Show me where autism is made!” Thursday while storming the Sour Patch Kid factory. “Attention Sour Patch Factory people: Give me the autism and no one gets hurt,” said the 71-year-old Cabinet member and vaccine skeptic, who cocked his gun and kicked down the door of the facility, grabbing workers, shooting bullets at conveyor belts, and kicking down enormous vats of bright colored gelatin before demanding to see the “head autism scientist” so he could kill him and “end autism forever.” “Enough! You can try to hide autism all you want, but I know it's in here. I can smell it! I have searched high and low—at the Skittles factory, at the Warheads factory, and at the Nerds Gummy Clusters factory. But it ends today. Autism, prepare to eat lead!” At press time, Kennedy could be heard screaming “Oh no, the autism's got me!” and begging a factory worker to put him out of his misery.

(https://theonion.com/show-me-where-you-make-autism-shouts-rfk-jr-storming-sour-patch-kids-factory/)