Donald Trump is losing lawyers on his defense team either because they are leaving of their own accord or because he, for whatever reason, has forced them out. But he seems to be finding it hard to recruit top-level lawyers to replace them, with many prominent attorneys turning down his approaches.
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We have just gone through another round of diplomatic expulsions. After Russia was accused of poisoning an ex-Russian spy and his daughter in the UK, many nations on the EU, NATO, and the US ‘punished’ Russia by expelling some of their diplomats and closing some consulates. In retaliation, Russia has expelled US diplomats and closed a US consulate in Russia. Such retaliatory moves are a sign that relations between the parties involved have reached a particularly low ebb.
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Today is Good Friday and this coming Sunday is Easter Sunday, both major days in the Christian calendar. The so-called ‘war on Christmas’ is something that politicians have got a lot of mileage out of. In addition to feeding the persecution complex of some Christians who like to think of themselves as under siege for their faith in the US of all places, it is also used as a cudgel by them against those who oppose their attempts to impose Christianity and its practices on everyone, by having prayers and Christian symbols occupy the public sphere.
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Clarence King (1842-1901) was the first director of the US Geological Survey and played an instrumental role during the major controversy at the end of the nineteenth century over the age of the Earth. Biologists who were convinced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution knew that for the unguided process of natural selection to work required long times and the absolute minimum age that they needed was 100 million years, though even that was stretching things. But physicists, led by Lord Kelvin, were pushing for a younger age based on their models of the Earth as a once-hot cooling body. (The discovery by Pierre Curie that the decay of radium produced prodigious amounts of heat and thus invalidated all the cooling models did not occur until 1903.) Geologists were in the middle since their models based on geological processes had parameters that were hugely variable and thus could not be the arbiter. But King pushed them over to the physicists’ side.
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Will Ferrell and Joel McHale ponder this age-old question as they visit the Hammer Museum and look at the exhibits.
(Via Rusty Blazenhoff)
Ransomware is where hackers gain access to a computer system and then prevent its legitimate users from accessing the data until they pay a ransom. Hospitals have often been targeted. The city government of Atlanta is the latest victim of this practice, having been locked out of its computers since last Thursday.
I presume all these institutions do backups of their systems pretty much all the time. So why, when attacked like this, can they not do a complete wipe of their systems and then reload using the backup? It may take some time, of course, but that can’t be why they don’t do it since the Atlanta lockout has gone on for almost a week.
I know that there are computer experts who read this blog. Can anyone explain this?
It is said that sports do not build character as much as reveal it. The cricket cheating scandal is a good example of that truism. Today, the Australian cricket authorities issued further summary punishments to captain Steve Smith, vice-captain David Warner, and Cameron Bancroft, issuing one year bans for Test and first class cricket on Smith and Warner and nine-months on Bancroft. Smith will not be eligible for consideration for captaincy for two years. The announcement singled Warner out as the ringleader of the plot and was not only stripped from his leadership role, he was banned for life from ever being considered for the captaincy. All three will also have to perform 100 hours of community service.
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Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary in the Conservative government, referred belittlingly to his Labour counterpart and aroused the ire of the speaker John Bercow who blasted him for his sexism.
I have been harshly critical in the past about Pakistan’s slide into religious intolerance, with its Muslim fundamentalist zealots killing and otherwise threatening non-Muslims under the cover of the state’s odious blasphemy laws. The prohibitions, discrimination, and harassment campaigns against the LGBT community in the Islamic world are also well documented. But I heard an encouraging story about a Pakistan TV station having its first transgender news anchor. Maavia Malik is a former model and her selection has not caused the kind of uproar one might have expected in a conservative Muslim country but was instead greeted with an overwhelmingly positive response.
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[UPDATE: According to this report, Australian cricket captain Steve Smith, vice-captain David Warner, and Cameron Bancroft have been ordered home immediately from South Africa by officials from Cricket Australia. Coach Darren Lehman was deemed to have no prior knowledge of the cheating plan and will remain in his position. But there will be a fuller investigation of the culture and behavior of the team and Lehmann’s role will undoubtedly be closely examined.]
The fallout from the ball tampering scandal by Australia continues with the cricket playing world expressing shock and even the Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull weighing in, saying that he and the nation were deeply disappointed and calling for the cricket authorities to take action. The intensity of the reaction is not because cricket is so pure that cheating does not happen at the highest levels but because what happened here was, to use a popular cliché, a perfect storm of events.
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