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A Trump-Backed Veteran Ran Hard to the Right, Only to Be Outflanked

Joe Kent, a decorated retired Green Beret and House candidate in Washington State, is discovering just how far the modern far right will go.

Joe Kent, a square-jawed Trump devotee running for a House seat in Washington State, is in a bit of a pickle.

Kent has campaigned as a “Stop the Steal”-style candidate on Donald Trump’s “America First” platform, positions that apparently caught the eye of the former president, who has endorsed him.

Kent insists the 2020 election was rigged, and has rationalized the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, by claiming that an otherwise peaceful crowd was infiltrated by Deep State agents provocateurs. In September, he spoke at a rally in Washington, D.C., in support of people accused of storming the Capitol, urging the release of what he called “political prisoners.”

Kent is running to unseat Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Republican, in Washington’s solidly red Third Congressional District. A relative moderate, she voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol — a decision that put her on the former president’s list of House Republicans he is targeting for removal.

Mark Stephan.
Stephan

Mark Stephan, a political scientist at Washington State University, said he could envision a showdown in the fall between Herrera Beutler and Kent, but allowed that Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, the leading Democrat, might squeak through to the general election if enough Republicans split their votes.

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New York Times

3 Republicans who impeached Trump vie to keep their seats in Tuesday’s primaries

Three House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump and accuse him of inciting the Capitol riot are on primary ballots Tuesday in Michigan and Washington state — the latest test of the former president’s grip on the GOP and Republican voters.

Reps. Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse of Washington and Peter Meijer of Michigan all hope to fend off challengers endorsed and boosted by Trump.

Newhouse and Herrera Beutler could survive their Trump-backed primary challenges due in part to Washington’s unique voting system. The state’s primary sends the top two vote-getting candidates on to the general election regardless of their party affiliation.

Travis Ridout.
Ridout

This type of primary system can be “helpful for the incumbents who are perceived as moderate,” Travis Ridout, a political science professor at Washington State University, told ABC News.

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ABC News
Deltaplex News

Announcing the 2022 American Chemical Society fellows

45 new fellows honored for their contributions to science

The American Chemical Society has named 45 members as ACS fellows.

Allan Felsot.
Felsot

Allan Felsot, professor in the WSU School of the Environment, is among the new cohort of fellows.

The fellows program began in 2009 as a way to recognize ACS members for outstanding achievements in and contributions to science, the profession, and ACS.

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Chemical & Engineering News

‘These images belong to all of us’: Spokane-area astronomers celebrate out-of-this-world footage from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently revealed a batch of out-of-this world images.

Webb’s First Deep Field is an infrared image that covers a miniscule patch of sky visible from the Southern hemisphere. The image illustrates the early universe with thousands of shimmering galaxies that help fill the celestial void. It is the highest resolution infrared image of the early universe that has ever existed.

One image shown in the release Monday is a spectrum of exoplanet WASP-96 b. The data that the Webb telescope found from WASP-96 b gives evidence to the existence of water vapor on the gas giant.

Vivienne Baldassare.
Baldassare

Vivienne Baldassare, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Washington State University, specializes in black holes in small galaxies and is going to use the Webb Telescope images to help with her research. Baldassare, along with a team of distinguished scientists, was awarded observations to study nearby smaller galaxies and other stellar systems to search for black holes, she said.

“This is my life’s work to try to study this population of black holes in small galaxies,” she said. Astronomy and a lot of different science fields are hugely collaborative efforts, and I love being part of a group that’s working together to try to answer these questions.”

Baldassare is jubilant about being able to further her research, but she said she believes there’s more to these pictures than meets the eye.

“The telescope is an amazing international collaboration. These images belong to all of us,” Baldassare said.

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Spokesman-Review

Serial Collapses of Ancient Pueblo Societies Offer a Stark Warning For Today’s World

In the area where the Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexican borders now meet, ancestral Pueblo societies thrived and then collapsed several times, over the span of 800 years.

Each time they recovered, their culture transformed. This shifting history can be seen in their pottery and the incredible stone and earth dwellings they created. During 300 of those years, some Pueblo peoples, who also used ink tattoos, were ruled by a matrilineal dynasty.

As in the collapse of other ancient civilizations, ancestral Pueblo social collapses align with periods of changing climate – but Pueblo farmers often persevered through droughts, suggesting that there was more to their collapses than just environmental conditions.

Tim Kohler.
Kohler

“Societies that are cohesive can often find ways to overcome climate challenges,” explained Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler back in 2021.

“But societies that are riven by internal social dynamics of any sort – which could be wealth differences, racial disparities or other divisions – are fragile because of those factors. Then climate challenges can easily become very serious.”

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Science alert