Today’s edition of quick hits.
* These protests are related to democracy, too: “Protesters increasingly fed up with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ‘zero-Covid’ restrictions rallied in cities across the country over the weekend, in a widespread show of resistance to Communist Party rule that has not been seen in decades.”
* A lawsuit worth watching: “Writer and columnist E. Jean Carroll is suing former president Donald Trump over an alleged sexual assault in the 1990s, under a New York law that lets sexual assault victims file suit years later.”
* Scary stuff: “Across the country, openly carrying a gun in public is no longer just an exercise in self-defense — increasingly it is a soapbox for elevating one’s voice and, just as often, quieting someone else’s.”
* In Brazil: “For more than a year, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil had warned that he might not accept a loss in last month’s presidential election. Then he lost. In response, he reluctantly agreed to begin the transition of power — while his allies inspected the election results for evidence of anything amiss. This week, his campaign claimed to have found it: a small software bug in the voting machines. On Tuesday, the campaign filed a request to effectively overturn the election in Mr. Bolsonaro’s favor, saying the bug should nullify votes from about 60 percent of the voting machines.”
* On a related note: “While tens of thousands of supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro camp outside military facilities across Brazil to protest his election loss, members of Bolsonaro’s inner circle are meeting with advisers to former president Donald Trump to discuss next steps.”
* A beautiful find: “On the floor of a shallow crater on Mars, the NASA rover Perseverance has hit what scientists are hoping is pay dirt. Martian rocks excavated by the rover show signs of a watery past and are loaded with the kind of organic molecules that are the foundation for life as we know it.”
* I wish folks were more cautious about fake quotes: “The Republican Party posted a quote on Twitter Friday about freedom, of all things, that was falsely attributed to George Washington.”
* Good choice: “‘Gaslighting’ — mind manipulating, grossly misleading, downright deceitful — is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year. Lookups for the word on merriam-webster.com increased 1,740% in 2022 over the year before. But something else happened. There wasn’t a single event that drove significant spikes in the curiosity, as it usually goes with the chosen word of the year. The gaslighting was pervasive.”
See you tomorrow.