Murder in the English village

The 19th season of the British TV series Midsomer Murders has started streaming on Netflix. This is quite an achievement in longevity. I wrote about this long-running show two years ago and it sparked a lot of interesting comments and suggestions for other similar series. Thanks to those, I have watched episodes of Death in Paradise, Inspector Morse, and the first two seasons of the much more superior show (in terms of writing, acting, and plotting) of Broadchurch and am looking forward to the third.
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Context is everything

Democratic congressperson Elijah Cummings has been one of the most vocal critics of Donald Trump. So when, in an interview after meeting with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Trump said to a reporter, “Elijah Cummings was in my office and he said, “You will go down as one of the great presidents in the history of our country” pretty much nobody believed him and put that down to yet another falsehood by this pathological liar.
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On the road to single payer?

After the humiliating debacle in which Paul Ryan and Donald Trump had to pull their health care bill from the floor or see it go down in flames, the talk was that the reform effort was dead, at least for some time, and that Trump and Ryan would reluctantly defer health care actions that hurt the poor and middle class and instead move on to other things dear to their hearts that hurt the poor and middle class, like cutting taxes on the wealthy.
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The wall with Mexico has already caused problems

I wrote a short while ago about how the proposed border wall with Mexico could face problems when it came to the Rio Grande river that forms about 1000 miles of the border that separates Texas and Mexico. Putting the wall on the US side, which is the only realistic option, means ceding the river to Mexico. This is not a purely hypothetical exercise. Back in 2006 when there was an earlier spurt of wall building, it resulted in many Americans, farmers and householders, finding themselves on the Mexican side of the fence, effectively shut out of their own country, and also had land taken from them under the doctrine of eminent domain.
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Manipulating yellow traffic light times for profit

I have been a supporter of cameras at traffic lights to catch people who run red lights. It seemed like an impartial way to catch offenders who indulged in this dangerous practice because the camera did not care about your gender, age, ethnicity, class, type of car, or other factors that might cause a traffic police officer to decide whether to issue a ticket or not. Furthermore, it seems like a waste of time to have police hanging around at intersections doing something that a machine could do better when they could be doing more important things like preventing crime or catching criminals.
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The need to remember when it is not about us

I recently attended an excellent talk organized by the Center of Inquiry of Northeast Ohio. It was by Mandisa Thomas, the founder of Black Nonbelievers, and she provided a concise history of the troubled relationship between the black community and Christianity. After being forced to adopt Christianity while they were enslaved, the church then became a focal point of black life after Emancipation and Reconstruction, providing leadership and refuge during the era of Jim Crow and the civil rights struggle.
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Cycling around the world in 80 days

Ever since the Jules Verne classic novel Around the World in 80 Days and subsequent film celebrated the achievement of circling the globe, the idea has appealed to people trying to recreate a similar challenge in different forms. Mark Beaumont is planning to cycle around the globe in 80 days, which would be 43 days less than the current record. This requires him to cycle 240 miles a day, which he plans to do in four four-hour shifts per day.
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The convoluted tale of Russian hacking

I have been sort-of following the story about possible Russian interference in the US election. I say ‘sort-of’ because it seems to me that the ratio of actual facts to elaborate hypothesizing is tiny. Each day seems to bring with it some new allegation based on anonymous sources that gets people worked up into a frenzy. As I see it, many possible scenarios are being merged into one big mess. Here are the various possibilities as I see them, going from the most serious to the least:
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