Millionaire Republican David Trott (MI-11) held a raucous townhall meeting this past weekend where upwards of one thousand of his constituents tried to attend, many of whom were left out in the cold because the venue they chose was too small to contain them all. Not by accident, of course:

Solicitous staffers had taken every precaution to limit the damage, scheduling the town hall to begin in the first hour past sunrise on a snowy Saturday morning, in a venue they were obliged to vacate in time to make way for the boat show opening 90 minutes later. The weather gods were complicit, whipping up a sudden blizzard that spun cars into ditches and brought traffic on the major arteries leading to the Suburban Collection Showplace to a standstill.

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At the town hall, Trott was firm in his support for repealing the Affordable Care Act which will uninsure tens of millions of Americans in the first decade. After the event concluded, he was ushered out of the hall to chants of “VOTE HIM OUT!” Unfortunately for him, someone forgot to turn of his lapel microphone and he and his aides were heard planning to portray his constituents as “un-American” and admitting to “bouncing” questions – tossing out question cards they didn’t want to have to answer.

At around the 0:34 second mark in the video below, you can hear Trott’s aide say, “We’re going to take that part where they’re booing funding the military and I’m gonna get somebody to write a story and we’re going to blow the shit out of that. It’s un-American crap.” He’s referring to the fact that the crowd booed him when he called the American military “the weakest it’s ever been.” Later in the video, Trott asks if they “bounced” any questions. His aide confirms they did.

Maryland’s third-seeded women’s basketball team was about to polish off a terrific second quarter Sunday afternoon when West Virginia’s Teana Muldrow connected on a layup with time expiring. That seemed to be the half’s conclusion. It was all over but the buzzer.

The ball was inbounded to freshman phenom Destiny Slocum, who had about three seconds to attempt a desperation shot. She chose not to take advantage of the full three seconds, instead using a two-handed overhead delivery to slingshot the ball 70 feet down the court. It seemed like an afterthought. Then it swished through the net for one of the wackiest buzzer beaters you will ever see.

The Xfinity Center crowd went bonkers. Slocum turned to the media table and stands with her mouth open in shock. Then she was mobbed by her entire team.

https://twitter.com/ConnorNewcomb_/status/843542312139603968

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SAN FRANCISCO — It was just before midnight on Dec. 17, 2016, when most of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, went dark.

A transmission station, a type of power station that transmits high voltage electricity across large areas, had gone down. Vsevolod Kovalchuk, the head of Ukrainian state power grid operator Ukrenergo, explained on his Facebook page that the station had come under an “external attack” lasting roughly 30 minutes.

It was, cybersecurity experts said, the most recent maneuver in Russia’s increasingly aggressive and overt efforts to push the boundaries of modern-day warfare using everything from old-fashioned kompromat, the Russian term for publishing (real or fake) compromising material designed to smear opponents, to malware that blacks out cities.

“The Russians use cyberweapons like they butter bread in the morning. It’s a critical, fundamental component of their global hybrid warfare strategy. They are pushing the envelope on how they use it every day,” said Malcolm Nance, a former counterterrorism and intelligence officer for the US military, intelligence agencies, and the Department of Homeland Security. “Ukraine is just one of many test beds.”

If the world is currently entering a new era of cyberwarfare, Russian hackers are the pirates of those yet-uncharted seas. Nearly every week brings a new cyberattack, as Russia tests the vulnerabilities of countries around the world. From hacking into the emails of senior members of the Democratic Party to defacing the websites of Eastern European political candidates, Russia is being named as the perpetrator of the most audacious cyberattacks in recent years. In some cases, those attacks are acts of espionage, looking to sweep up as much intelligence as possible. In others, Russia is toying with psychological operations, teasing out their geopolitical goals. Just this week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that a 2014 breach of Yahoo, which exposed more than 500 million email accounts, had actually been the work of Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agents working with cybercriminals — one of the largest email breaches in history, targeting, the DOJ said, the email accounts of a small group of journalists, dissidents, and US government officials.

Climate change can be seen when a mountainside’s trees turn brown thanks to the burrowing of bark beetles, an insect population that explodes during drought, or when an iconic species is pushed closer to extinction. But some of its effects are obvious only to those who look for them. From decades’ worth of data, scientists build narratives about how the oceans are acidifying, the average temperatures are warming and the precipitation is becoming more extreme.

Jill Pelto, a recent graduate from the University of Maine, has made it her mission to communicate these changes. The 22-year-old artist paints vivid watercolors of mountains, glaciers, waves and animals, that on closer inspection, reveal jagged line graphs more commonly seen in the pages of a scientific journal than on a gallery’s walls. Pelto incorporates real scientific data into her art. In one piece, the silver bodies of Coho salmon dance over blue, rippled water filling a space under a falling graph line. The line connects data points that document the decline of snow and glacier melt that feed the rivers the fish inhabit. Another combines data that describe the rising of sea levels, the climbing demand for fossil fuels, the decline of glaciers and the soaring average temperatures. All of those line graphs lay one over another to create a landscape telling the story of climate change.

Mauri Pelto, Jill’s father, is a glaciologist and professor at Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts. When she was 16, Jill joined him in the mountains of Washington for a field season, measuring the depths of crevasses in the glaciers they tracked, recording the extent of snow and ice, and looking for other changes. The experience was life changing. She hiked up the North Cascades for six more field seasons and, in that time, witnessed the slow deaths of the mountains’ glaciers. Around the world, once intimidating bodies of ice and snow are ceasing their centuries-old movement and becoming static remnants of their former selves, pocked with melt-water pools and riddled with caves in the summer.

Now that she has earned her undergraduate degree in studio art and earth science, Pelto has plans to pursue a Master’s degree in climate science at the University of Maine next fall.