As Robert Mackey writes, the decision by the FBI to not prosecute Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server is being celebrated by the Clinton camp even though the FBI says that she had been “extremely careless” in her treatment of classified material and had lied repeatedly about whether she had sent classified emails through her unclassified private server.
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Pakistan once had the promise of becoming a truly modern secular state but it has increasingly succumbed to indulging religious fanatics who seek to impose a theocracy on the nation. Their blasphemy laws have been used to attack both Muslims and non-Muslims, using bogus allegations that the victims had made statements denigrating the prophet Mohammed or desecrating the Koran.
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Cleveland just witnessed a very strange and disturbing incident. Ahmed al-Menhali, a citizen of the United Arab Emirates, had come to Cleveland to take advantage of the medical facilities at the Cleveland Clinic and was checking into a suburban hotel when a police team armed with assault rifles stormed in and tackled him to the ground. They soon discovered that he was innocent but the man collapsed and was rushed to a nearby hospital.
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With much of the attention focused on the US presidential elections and the vote by the UK to leave the EU, not much attention has been paid to what has been going on in Israel where there has been yet another crackdown by the Israeli government on the Palestinians that show their willingness to use their power over the Occupied Territories in the West Bank and Gaza to make life miserable for the people living there.
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Today is independence day in the US. John Oliver takes a moment to remind Americans what they gave up when they broke their bonds with England. I can do without almost everything he lists but the one thing that I regret not being able to find in the US are the savory pastries. In the US, pastries tend to be very sticky and sweet, like doughnuts and Danishes.
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Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party and a leading advocate of withdrawal from the EU, has suddenly resigned his party leadership, adding to the large list of people who have decided to take a lower profile following the Brexit vite.
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Readers may remember the scare over the hole in the ozone layer that appeared over Antarctica and had been growing at an alarming rate. That layer protected the Earth from dangerous levels of ultraviolet radiation and the danger posed by the hole resulted in concerted action to try and combat it. The 1987 Montreal Protocol targeted the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)that were believed to be the main cause of the rupture and the good news is that those efforts seem to be bearing fruit.
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While the fatal crash involving a Tesla car on autopilot mode attention has naturally focused attention on whether self-driving cars can be trusted, we should not lose sight of the dangerous levels of outright stupidity that human drivers are capable of. I was reminded of this when a few days ago I was stopped at a red light and looked in my rear view mirror. In the car behind me the driver had his cat perched on top of the dashboard exactly between him and the windshield.
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In a turn of events that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, two transgender women have won primary races and are now the Democratic candidates for Congress, one for the US Senate in Utah and the other for the US House of Representatives in Colorado. By a coincidence, both of them have the same first name of Misty.
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We know that mirrors can mislead by seeming to switch left-right symmetry but we do not expect it to change the shapes of things. But Mark Frauenfelder brings to my attention this fine illusion by Kokichi Sugihara that makes what looks like circles get reflected as squares and vice versa.
Can you figure out how this illusion works? The solution is given below the fold.