AutoTL;DR

This is the best summary I could come up with:

We spent a month Interrailing around the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and France, so my family of five felt like we’d experienced everything that train travel had to offer.

Unlike lots of city transport systems that are a bit tucked away, such as the London Underground, this one’s very visible, given the huge green frames that hold the rail above the road and river.

It took another 80 years before construction work began on the electric system we see today, with the upside-down monorail offered to big cities like Berlin and Munich before being installed in what is now known as Wuppertal.

But there’s still plenty of ticket options, including buying the €49 monthly DeutschlandTicket that covers all local transport like buses, subways, trams, S-Bahns and regional trains throughout Germany.

As well as its unique train system beloved by both tourists and commuters, Wuppertal also lays claim to being the greenest town in Germany, as you’re never more than 10 minutes’ walk from one of its many green spaces.

There’s plenty of fascinating stories over its 125 years in existence, including the time that a circus elephant was being transported in one of the carriages as a publicity stunt in 1950, before panicking, smashing through a window and falling into the river below.

The original article contains 867 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The fight to stop climate change is slowly creeping from the environmental front lines of land and sea to the hallowed halls of Australia’s courtrooms.

But then a group of Tiwi Islander traditional owners, led by Dennis Tipakalippa, took the regulator to court, saying the approval was unlawful as they hadn’t been properly consulted.

But following its win, Santos CEO Kevin Gallagher stood in front of reporters in Darwin and said the company wouldn’t pursue the Tiwi Islanders for costs.

Santos applied to the court for subpoenas seeking a wide range of documents from four environmental charities: The Environment Centre NT (ECNT), Jubilee Australia, Sunrise and Market Forces.

“Santos is using the potential of seeking costs against third parties … to go after groups who merely offer moral or solidarity support to public interest litigants,” Mr Watson says.

The subpoena issued to ECNT disrupted the organisation enormously, Ms Howey says, forcing them to hire lawyers and divert staffing resources.

The original article contains 1,997 words, the summary contains 159 words. Saved 92%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The Supreme Court ruled Friday in favor of an Oregon city that ticketed homeless people for sleeping outside, rejecting arguments that such “anti-camping” ordinances violate the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment.

“The Constitution’s Eighth Amendment serves many important functions, but it does not authorize federal judges to wrest those rights and responsibilities from the American people and in their place dictate this Nation’s homelessness policy,” Gorsuch wrote in his majority opinion.

Nor can a handful of federal judges begin to ‘match’ the collective wisdom the American people possess in deciding ‘how best to handle’ a pressing social question like homelessness.”

In a move that underscored her discontent with the court’s ruling, Sotomayor took the rare step of reading her dissent from the bench on Friday.

Grants Pass argued that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual” punishment was aimed at torture or hard labor sentences, not tickets.

“These are low-level fines and very short jail terms for repeat offenders that are in effect in many other jurisdictions,” the attorney, Theane Evangelis, said during the April 22 oral arguments.

The original article contains 695 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

It was almost 12 years ago that the first formal fact check was published on the ABC News website, an analysis of a claim about Australia’s debt by then-prime minister Kevin Rudd, which the fledgling fact-checking unit found to be accurate.

The intervening years saw growing public policy challenges brought about by climate change, the Black Summer bushfires, a global pandemic and the Voice to Parliament referendum triggering an epidemic of misinformation, supercharged by social media.

Even though both parties may have produced the largest debt or deficit in nominal terms, when accounting for the size of the economy and the passage of time, this was overshadowed by the numbers racked up during World War II.

Scott Morrison fell into the trap of making misleading comparisons when, as prime minister, he claimed the COVID-19 recession was 30 times larger than the global financial crisis, with experts telling Fact Check the two downturns were fundamentally different in nature and shouldn’t be compared.

In the months leading up to the 2022 election, Mr Morrison and treasurer Josh Frydenberg made a series of claims to the effect that Australia had achieved greater reductions in carbon emissions than other comparable nations.

Heading the eponymously named Katter’s Australian Party, the Queenslander declared that people were “entitled to their sexual proclivities, let there be a thousand blossoms bloom”, before his demeanour darkened and he said he would spend no more time on the topic.

The original article contains 1,992 words, the summary contains 238 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Recent examination of a human fossil unearthed at the Cova Negra archaeological site in the Spanish province of Valencia found traits in the inner-ear anatomy which indicated Down syndrome, in the earliest-known evidence of the genetic condition.

“The pathology which this individual suffered resulted in highly disabling symptoms, including, at the very least, complete deafness, severe vertigo attacks and an inability to maintain balance,” said Mercedes Conde-Valverde, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Alcalá in Spain, lead author of the study, published in the journal Science Advances.

Among other pathologies, there were abnormalities in the semicircular canals – three small tubes that govern balance and sense head position – and a reduction in the size of the cochlea, the part of the inner ear involved in hearing.

Previous research has shown that Neanderthals were intelligent, and created art, pigments, symbolic objects and perhaps a spoken language, as well as utilising complex group hunting methods.

Archaeological evidence at Cova Negra indicates the site was occupied for short periods at a time by small groups of Neanderthals – hunter-gatherers who roamed the landscape in search of food and other resources.

Tina’s age at death, based on the maturation state of certain inner-ear structures, shows unusual longevity for a child in such circumstances with a condition known for intellectual disability and developmental delays.

The original article contains 704 words, the summary contains 220 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

They join Louis, Armand, Molloy, Sam, Raglan, Fareed and others we can’t tell you about yet on a sexy pilgrimage across space, time and trauma.

The second season stars Jacob Anderson, along with Sam Reid, Eric Bogosian, Assad Zaman, Delainey Hayles and Ben Daniels.

“What Rolin has done with these stories and characters, working so closely with Mark, as the steward of this universe, has exceeded the loftiest version of our expectations.

We can’t wait to see where this creative team takes the series from here and know we are walking alongside an incredibly loyal and passionate base of fans who feel as strongly about this material as we do.”

Thank you to Dan McDermott, Ben Davis for the funds and tools to continue the great work of dramatizing Anne Rice’s extraordinary novels.

Reid also elaborated on how a major event from the penultimate episode — spoiler alert: the death of Claudia, played by Delainey Hayles — will impact Lestat moving forward.

The original article contains 790 words, the summary contains 162 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A New Jersey man was warning people on the beach about an incoming storm when he was fatally struck by lightning over the weekend, police said.

Patrick Dispoto, 59, of Manchester Township, was struck Sunday evening on J Street Beach, Seaside Park Sgt.

Dispoto was found unconscious on the beach at 7:38 p.m., Casole said Wednesday.

Dispoto’s girlfriend told investigators he went to warn others about an approaching storm while she stayed in the car, police said.

When he didn’t return to the vehicle, his girlfriend went to check on him on the beach, police said.

Dispoto was later pronounced dead at a hospital, Casole said.

The original article contains 109 words, the summary contains 106 words. Saved 3%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has landed in Australia, ending the former fugitive’s decade-long diplomatic saga.

As he stepped off the plane, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, speaking from parliament, welcomed his return.

“Earlier tonight I was pleased to speak to Mr Assange to welcome him home and had the opportunity to ask him about his health and have my first discussion with him,” he said.

Mr Albanese said Assange expressed “praise” for the Australian government’s efforts in returning him home, saying it took patient diplomacy.

Earlier on Wednesday, Assange pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiracy with a sentence of “time already served”, in a deal that concluded the United States’ pursuit of him for more than a decade.

The US had sought Assange’s extradition from the United Kingdom since 2012 over the publication of classified US military intelligence through WikiLeaks.

The original article contains 266 words, the summary contains 140 words. Saved 47%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A wax effigy of President Abraham Lincoln has melted as temperatures soared over the weekend in the nation’s capital.

The head from the 6ft wax sculpture of the Lincoln Memorial is now under repair, leaving behind a wire sticking out of the 16th president’s neck.

The memorial rests on the site of Camp Barker in Washington DC - a Civil War-era refugee camp that housed formerly enslaved and freed African Americans - now home to an elementary school.It was placed outside of Garrison Elementary School as part of The Wax Monument Series by Virginia-based artist Sandy Williams IV.The replica is more than just a wax statue - it is also a candle.

The installation is a “direct commentary on DC’s history of Civil War-era Contraband Camps”, according to its website.

The replica, commissioned by non-profit CulturalDC, is the third installation of Williams’ 40 ACRES Archive - The Wax Monument series which includes wax replicas of popular public monuments and cultural symbols.

The wax head is set to be reattached this week, local media outlets reported.

The original article contains 315 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 44%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The driver of the car, Margot Lewis, of North Liberty, Iowa, was found out of the vehicle being tended to by a passerby.

“In checking to see if anyone else was in the vehicle, a deceased individual, a 35-year-old female, was located in the back seat,” the sheriff’s office said.

The condition of the deceased woman was “suspicious” and “it was immediately apparent that the death was not a result of the motor vehicle accident” the sheriff’s office said.

According to a probable cause affidavit filed in the case, a deputy found the back seats of the Lewis’ vehicle folded down and found the body wrapped in a bed sheet, blanket, a futon-style mattress and a tarp.

The body was cold to the touch and there appeared be dried blood soaked in the bed sheet.

An autopsy found, based on preliminary information, that the fatal injuries to the victim “were not caused by, and preceded, the car crash,” the affidavit said.

The original article contains 317 words, the summary contains 160 words. Saved 50%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A Florida man eating in a diner with his wife recently sneezed so forcefully it caused parts of his intestines to exit his body through a surgical wound, according to researchers.

During treatments for a post-cancer recurrence, he encountered various health complications, and the man underwent a cystectomy, a procedure to remove his urinary bladder, 15 days before the diner incident, leaving him with a healing surgical wound on his abdomen.

Stunned, the man covered the protuberance with his shirt and considered driving himself to a hospital, but feared changing positions would make the wound worse and called an ambulance instead.

Arriving paramedics covered the wound with a pad and gave the man painkillers, rushing him to a nearby hopsital.

"Three Urologic surgeons carefully reduced the eviscerated bowel back into the abdominal cavity,” the cast study continues.

"While wound dehiscence is a well-known complication, this case is important because evisceration through the abdominal surgical site after cystectomy is poorly described in the medical literature,” the article concludes.

The original article contains 318 words, the summary contains 167 words. Saved 47%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

WikiLeaks announced Mr Assange’s whereabouts shortly after court documents showed he was due to plead guilty this week to violating US espionage law, in a deal that would allow him to return home to Australia.

WikiLeaks posted a statement on social media platform X saying Mr Assange was free and had left the UK on Monday morning local time.

Mr Assange’s father, John Shipton, told ABC Victorian Mornings his son had spent 15 of his most productive years “in some form of incarceration or another”.

“We are aware Australian citizen Mr Julian Assange has legal proceedings scheduled in the United States,” a spokesperson said.

“Prime Minister Albanese has been clear — Mr Assange’s case has dragged on for too long and there is nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration.”

Many press freedom advocates have argued that criminally charging Mr Assange represents a threat to free speech.

The original article contains 843 words, the summary contains 148 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A Texas law that banned abortions in early pregnancy is associated with a stark increase in infant and newborn deaths, a study published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics found.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report already found that infant and newborn mortality rates in the U.S. rose in 2022 for the first time since 2001.

“This shows what probably was expected before the Dobbs decision, that there would be downstream unintended consequences by banning abortions in early pregnancy,” said Dr. Mary Rosser, director of Integrated Women’s Health at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, who was not involved with the study.

Rosser added that such bans disproportionately affect marginalized populations including low-income families and people of color, and that further research is needed to better understand these effects.

The researchers of the new study also highlighted the ripple effect that a newborn or infant’s death can have on a family, including trauma and medical bills.

“Behind these numbers are people,” said Dr. Erika Werner, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Tufts Medical Center, who was not involved in the research.

The original article contains 588 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A few weeks ago, Patrick Jones, Meg Ulman, and their 11-year-old son, Woody, were waking to icy cold winter mornings at their home in Daylesford, in central Victoria.

In an age where giving lifts to strangers is mostly advised against, this family sees it as their preferred option to get to India, for environmental and social reasons.

Mr Jones and Ms Ulman do not own a car, have not been overseas in 20 years, and wanted to show their son the world, in the least polluting way possible.

Their longest lift in Australia was with an Adelaide man who was moving to Darwin to work as a truck driver for Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.

Mr Jones and his partner used to work full-time, but decided to change their lifestyles about 20 years ago, after finding they were “pretty much unhappy”.

“After many conversations with locals, it was becoming increasingly apparent that crewing a boat for a family-of-three with no sailing experience was a bit of a pipe dream,” the family wrote on their blog.

The original article contains 705 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

For centuries, Western scholars have touted the fate of the native population on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) as a case study in the devastating cost of environmentally unsustainable living.

Diamond controversially argued that the destruction of the island’s ecological environment triggered a downward spiral of internal warfare, population decline, and cannibalism, resulting in an eventual breakdown of social and political structures.

That work met with some mixed opinions from Lipo’s fellow archaeologists, with some suggesting that his team cherry-picked its radiocarbon dating—an allegation he dismissed at the time as “simply baloney and misinformed thinking.”

They filtered their radiocarbon samples to just those they were confident related to human occupation and human-related events, meaning they analyzed a smaller subset of all the available ages—not an unusual strategy to eliminate bias due to issues with old carbon—and the results for colonization estimates were about the same as before.

The results demonstrated a lack of evidence for a pre-contact collapse and instead offered strong support for a new emerging model of resilient communities that continued their long-term traditions despite the impacts of European arrival.

The volcanic soil on Easter Island is highly weathered and thus poor in nutrients essential for plant growth: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium primarily, but also calcium, magnesium, and sulfur.

The original article contains 1,377 words, the summary contains 210 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Starting with lamb cutlets, the cheapest was Famous Halal Quality Meat & Groceries, where they cost $19.99 a kg.

As part of our search, we also purchased four T-bone steaks (Famous Halal Quality Meat & Groceries does not carry them).

Chicken breast bucked the trend by coming in at least 50 cents cheaper at the supermarkets – costing $14 a kg at both Woolworths and Coles.

A Woolworths spokesperson said it was “difficult to make a like-for-like” comparison between “supermarkets and meat vendors who sell through public marketplaces like the Queen Victoria Market and have different business models and customer offerings”.

“The products sold across retailers can be sourced differently – Woolworths purchases premium cattle and lamb to a very tight quality specification, with its beef being independently certified through the Meat Standards Australia program.

Earlier this year, Guardian Australia found that buying in bulk from Sydney’s fruit and vegetable market cost barely 30% of supermarket prices.

The original article contains 1,032 words, the summary contains 157 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Clue: The United States Postal Service is honoring this iconic game show host with his own stamp.

As will be announced on-air by host Ken Jennings during Friday’s episode of Jeopardy!, the USPS is issuing a Forever Stamp in honor of the late, great Trebek, who famously hosted the show for 37 years.

The reveal of Trebek’s stamp coincides with Jeopardy!‘s 60th Diamond Celebration, which began earlier this year.

In white lettering against a blue background, the stamp reads “This naturalized U.S. citizen hosted the quiz show Jeopardy!

And if you happen to be in Los Angeles on July 22, you can also pick up the stamps at Sony Pictures Studios.

A public event will held at 4 pm PT on the day of the stamp’s release; interested parties must first register at https://usps.com/alextrebekstamp.

The original article contains 244 words, the summary contains 134 words. Saved 45%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The video was taken earlier this year, when Max Fennell, a hunter in northern California, filmed a group of wild elk apparently hanging out with a donkey who appeared to be a member of their herd.

The short clip of the unusual scene rapidly spread across social media.

Now Terrie Drewry and her husband, Dave, have told CBS news that they are convinced the free-roaming burro is their missing pet Diesel, who had scarpered into the wilderness five years earlier.

The Drewrys revealed that Diesel had gone missing after getting scared on a trail while on a hiking trip with his human family.

They searched for him in vain, though a trail camera spotted him, and hoof prints showed that he was still alive.

Despite their joy, in seeing Diesel alive and apparently thriving as a want-to-be elk, they have no plans to try to capture him.

The original article contains 234 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 37%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Decades worth of seismic data confirms the rotation of Earth’s inner core is moving slower than the planet’s surface.

Researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) created renderings of the inner core’s movement using seismic data recorded from various earthquakes and nuclear tests, both of which send vibrations through the planet.

By measuring the speed and interaction of the seismic waves within the Earth’s layers, researchers can estimate the position and movement of the inner core.

“The inner core had slowed down for the first time in many decades,” John Vidale, co-author of the study and a professor of Earth Sciences at USC, said in the statement.

The Earth’s inner core is a hot, dense and solid ball made of iron and nickel, located 3,200 miles (5,150 kilometers) below our feet.

Subtle changes in how long it took for the seismic waves to travel through the Earth at different times in the planet’s history revealed the inner core’s slowdown.

The original article contains 399 words, the summary contains 160 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A geoengineering technique designed to reduce high temperatures in California could inadvertently intensify heatwaves in Europe, according to a study that models the unintended consequences of regional tinkering with a changing climate.

The paper shows that targeted interventions to lower temperature in one area for one season might bring temporary benefits to some populations, but this has to be set against potentially negative side-effects in other parts of the world and shifting degrees of effectiveness over time.

Earlier this year, scientists at the University of Washington sprayed sea-salt particles across the flight deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier, the USS Hornet, docked in Alameda in San Francisco Bay.

Using Earth system computer models of the climate in 2010 and 2050, they simulated the impacts of two cloud brightening operations carried out over different regions of the north-eastern Pacific Ocean, one in the subtropics near California and one in the mid-latitudes near Alaska.

The 2010 simulation suggested the operation near Alaska would lower the risk of dangerous heat exposure in the target region by 55% – equivalent to 22 million people-days per summer – while the closer subtropical test would cause smaller, but still significant gains of 16%.

In simulations of the more disrupted climate of 2050, however, the same two operations produced very different results because there were fewer clouds, higher base temperatures and different ocean current patterns, most importantly a slowing of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc).

The original article contains 767 words, the summary contains 239 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!