Michael Ratner (1943-2016)

Anyone in the US who is concerned about human rights would likely be familiar with the name Michael Ratner who died of cancer on May 11. He was a lawyer who served as long-time president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and took an all manner of unpopular causes, such as fighting on behalf of Julian Assange and for the rights of Guantanamo detainees, where he won an important victory when the US Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 in 2008 that detainees had the right to the writ of habeas corpus. There have been many obituaries about his life and work and I will quote from just two.
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The never-ending soap opera that is now the Republican party

The next storyline is the will he/won’t he courtship between speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan, who is the one who is the chair of the party convention, and the presumptive nominee Donald Trump. Although Ryan has been playing coy and hard to get, we know how this will end of course. The person who wins the nomination gets to call the shots and so Paul Ryan will capitulate, the only question being when and how.
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Religious terrorists

During the interfaith panel that I was on recently, in my response to the question of whether there is a heaven, I said that the concept of heaven was not merely a harmless fantasy but harmful because it led people to do awful things in the belief that it would help them get into heaven. I mentioned Islamic terrorists who had committed recent atrocities and the Christian terrorist who gunned down the abortion providers in the belief that he would receive the grateful thanks of fetuses in heaven. I could have, if I had the time, listed Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindu terrorist acts as well.
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How to cut a cake fairly into N pieces

Suppose you have N people and one cake. How can you cut the cake such that each person is satisfied that the pieces have been distributed fairly? This is an old problem that Martin Gardner wrote up in his column for Scientific American and in the case of two people it is quite simple: One person gets to cut the cake into two and the other person gets to select the piece they want. (But see later for a problem with this.)

But what if there are more than two people? Below the fold, I give Gardner’s explanation on how to do it, starting with the case where N=3, quoted by Walter Stromquist in an issue of The American Mathematical Monthly.
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The next president of the Philippines?

Later today, the Philippines will officially declare the winner of its presidential elections. There are five candidates running and since there is no run-off, the winner needs only a plurality to become president. I had not been aware until today that the candidate currently leading in the vote count and expected to win, Rodrigo Duterte, has a horrific record and platform and has made no secret for his disdain for democratic checks and balances if they stand in the way of his agenda.
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