‘I’M BACK’: Trump Announces Return To Facebook After Two-Year Suspension

Former President Donald Trump posted to Facebook on Friday for the first time since getting booted from the platform in January 2021.

“I’M BACK!” he posted along with a short clip of his remarks after winning the 2016 presidential election. “Sorry to keep you waiting, complicated business. Complicated,” he says in the clip.

Meta lifted its suspension of Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in January, though the president posted to neither until Friday. The former president’s return to Facebook coincides with his ban from YouTube, a platform run by Google, being lifted as well.

Twitter was the first major social media platform to lift its ban on Trump after the former president was suspended from multiple platforms following the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Twitter CEO Elon Musk reactivated Trump’s Twitter account in November after buying the social media platform last year.

Trump has yet to return to Twitter, which was a staple of his communications prior to being banned in early 2021. Pundits have speculated if and when Trump will make a return to the platform as he campaigns for a 2024 presidential run. Recently, Trump has appeared to be most active on his own social media account, launched in the wake of his suspension from other platforms, Truth Social.

Meta suspended Trump’s accounts after January 6 over “a clear risk of real world harm” being done if the former president had remained on the platforms. Meta let Trump back onto its platforms in January because it judged that “the risk has sufficiently receded,” but the company put “new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses,” Meta said in a January statement.

“Like any other Facebook or Instagram user, Mr. Trump is subject to our Community Standards,” Meta said. “In light of his violations, he now also faces heightened penalties for repeat offenses — penalties which will apply to other public figures whose accounts are reinstated from suspensions related to civil unrest under our updated protocol. In the event that Mr. Trump posts further violating content, the content will be removed and he will be suspended for between one month and two years, depending on the severity of the violation.”

Aliens Could Exist On Exoplanets’ ‘Terminator Zone,’ Researchers Say

Extraterrestrial beings may be hiding on distant planets which have a “terminator zone,” a habitable band at the transition between the non-rotating planets’ warm, day side and the cold, dark night side, researchers conjecture.

That “terminator zone” would feature liquid water, which serves as a vital ingredient for life. Astronomers from the University of California, Irvine found exoplanets that have such “terminator zones.”

“These planets have a permanent day side and a permanent night side,” Ana Lobo, who led the study, stated. “This is a planet where the dayside can be scorching hot, well beyond habitability, and the night side is going to be freezing, potentially covered in ice. You could have large glaciers on the night side.”

“You want a planet that’s in the sweet spot of just the right temperature for having liquid water,” she opined.  “We are trying to draw attention to more water-limited planets, which despite not having widespread oceans, could have lakes or other smaller bodies of liquid water, and these climates could actually be very promising.”

Lobo noted that such planets are abundant because the stars near them comprise roughly 70% of M-dwarf stars, which we can see at night.

Terminator zones can be subject to constant winds caused by the difference between the cold and warm sides of the planet.  Such planets, if mostly covered with water, typically see the water evaporate, but land mitigates the effect.

The UCI researchers conducted modeling using a 3D global climate model “to determine whether it is possible to sustain a temperature gradient large enough for a terminator habitability scenario, and to explore the implications of terminator habitability for future climate characterization studies,” the study stated.

“It is not our goal to precisely quantify the habitable-zone edge, given that its location is dependent on a large range of properties, including planetary radius and surface gravity among many other factors but rather to explore the mechanisms through which the atmosphere responds to increased stellar flux, including changes in the radiative budget and atmospheric energy transport, in order to determine the viability of these surface climate configurations,” they added.

“Ana has shown if there’s a lot of land on the planet, the scenario we call ‘terminator habitability’ can exist a lot more easily,” Lobo’s teammate Aomawa Shields of UCI enthused. “These new and exotic habitability states our team is uncovering are no longer the stuff of science fiction — Ana has done the work to show that such states can be climatically stable.”

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