• Sumatran rhinoceros goes extinct in Malaysia as last living member of the species there dies in Borneo: The rhino, named Iman and estimated to be about 25 years old, was captured in the eastern state of Sabah in 2014. She had uterine tumors at the time and over the years the pain and pressure on her bladder from these contributed to the stress on her system that naturalists say killed her. Just six months ago, Malaysia’s only male rhino died, and another female died in 2017. There had been unsuccessful attempts to breed them. “Despite us knowing that this would happen sooner rather than later, we are so very saddened by this news,” said Christina Liew, the environment minister for Sabah. Sumatrans are the only rhino with two horns. Estimates put their total number of survivors on Sumatra and on the Indonesian portion of Borneo at 80.
• AG Bill Barr announces plan to investigate missing and murdered indigenous people: Barr made the announcement on the land of the Confederated and Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana. A number of members of the confederated tribes have gone missing. As in cases of other indigenous people who have been murdered or gone missing, most of these are women. Under the newly established Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Initiative, the Department of Justice will assign the task to staff from 11 U.S. attorney offices in states with Native reservations. Montana has been a leader in investigating missing indigenous people. Earlier this year, they adopted “Hanna’s Act,” directing the state’s department of justice to help local authorities look into cases. Hanna Harris was a Lame Deer woman found murdered on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in 2013. Enrolled members of the seven Native tribes in Montana make up 7% of the population, but 30% of the missing persons in the state. Indigenous women are 3 to 3.5 times as likely to suffer violence than other women, and 85% of that violence comes from non-Native men. A study published in 2017 found that, between 2010 and 2018, in 71 urban communities, there were 506 cases of missing or murdered indigenous women reported—128 or 25% were reported missing, 280 or 56% were murdered, and in 98 or 19% were unknown. Numerous indigenous activist groups have arisen to confront the lack of concern for the matter that has been exhibited by many authorities.
• Why is Pete Buttigieg’s campaign the only one with a chief information security officer?
MIDDAY TWEET
• Elon Musk’s new Cybertruck looks like a reject vehicle from Mad Max: Fury Road. Tesla stock shares plummeted more than 6% Friday after the roll-out marred by the electric truck’s smashed windows that were supposed to be bulletproof. But it takes guts to bet against Tesla and Musk even when the product is as hideous as this one. So far, however, amateur tallies put the pre-orders for the $39,900 pickup—which require a $100 application fee—at more than 200,000.
• Chauncey DeVega at Salon talks to historian Timothy Synder about how democracies can succumb to authoritarian rule and what to do when Donald Trump is out of office:
In this conversation, Snyder implores the "Resistance" and other Americans of conscience to craft a positive narrative of their political vision rather than simply opposing Donald Trump’s regime. Snyder also urges the Democrats, especially if they defeat Trump in 2020, to immediately pursue a plan to save American democracy and the country’s future by addressing fundamental problems of social inequality and imminent global climate disaster. As he did in [his 2017 book] "On Tyranny," Snyder again warns that if Trump is re-elected, the American people must enter survival mode and learn lessons about how people in other countries survived authoritarianism and totalitarianism, and ultimately defeated them.
• Researchers flatten claim of Brazilian authorities that fires in the Amazon this August have been “average” or “normal”: Writing in the journal Global Change Biology, a group of scientists say the number of active fires that month was actually three times higher than in 2018 and the highest number since 2010.
• No surprise. A.I. systems echo the biases they are taught, putting scientists on alert.