How science is helping eliminate false convictions

In my post on the documentary The Thin Blue Line, I mentioned how in so many jurisdictions in the US the police, the prosecutors, and even the medical examiners offices are so determined to pin the crime on someone that they are willing to manufacture evidence or overlook or even actively suppress evidence that suggests that they might have the wrong person. Fortunately, there has been an increase in private individuals and pro bono lawyers who have taken an interest in such cases and there have been some high-profile releases of wrong incarcerated people.
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Channeling Marcel Marceau

We are currently experiencing a prolonged period of snow and extreme cold and wind, though In Cleveland the snowfall has been a couple of inches every other day or so and not the massive snowstorms that have hit other parts of the northeast. But it was bad enough that driving required considerable caution.

This video of Mike Warner of Oregon trying to climb stairs in 90 mph wind reminds me of the old ‘walking into the wind’ mime classic.
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Lifestyles of the rich and drunken

Jacqueline Kent Cooke, the heiress daughter of the late Jack Kent Cooke, the former owner of the Washington football team that refuses to change its racist name, apparently got drunk on New Year’s eve at a fancy restaurant and used anti-Semitic slurs on a fellow patron that later resulted in a brawl on the street outside that was captured on video, with Cooke sitting on the sidewalk and bringing down her adversary with an ankle tackle.
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China uses Trump to plot its own rise

There has been a huge wave of media attention for Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House about the Trump administration’s first year in office. One can see why by reading a long excerpt here [Update: Another long extract was released today.]. It seems to consist of the kind of insider gossip that people love, with various people dishing dirt on their rivals. But as far as I can tell, it adds nothing new to what we already knew, that Donald Trump is, as Alfie Kohn accurately described him, a narcissistic, boasting, lying, preening, swaggering, thin-skinned, petulant, desperately competitive, vindictive person with the “attention span of a toddler” who is lacking in “shame, humility, empathy, or capacity for reflection and self-scrutiny” and also “lacking not only in knowledge but in curiosity”. What the book does seem to add is that Trump’s mental faculties, such as they are, are deteriorating even from their previously low levels.
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