Today’s comic by Mark Fiore is Journey to Planet JupitEarth:
What’s coming up on Sunday Kos...
- Republicans show how it’s done, by Jon Perr
- Look in the mirror: The police are but a reflection of who we are, by Egberto Willies
- How Republicans celebrate the National Park Service’s 100th anniversary, by Susan Grigsby
- Oil and ISIS: If we hadn’t needed one, the other wouldn’t exist, by Ian Reifowitz
- Rio Olympics: Faster, higher, stronger? How about tardier, broker, sicker, by Sher Watts Spooner
- International Elections Digest: All-you-can-eat Brexit, by Daily Kos Elections International
- What do the American people really want? Reflections on the Socialism 2016 conference, by Chauncey DeVega
- Why some states get polled more than others, even when it makes no apparent sense, by Steve Singiser
- How far have we come since the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial,’ by Denise Oliver Velez
- The simulation hypothesis, by DarkSyde
- Retracing Cold War memories—Part Two, Dachau, by Mark E Anderson
• The advent of killer police robots:
In the mourning over the murders of five police officers in Dallas, and relief that the standoff had ended, one unusual detail stuck out: the manner in which police killed one suspect after negotiations failed.
“We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was,” Chief David Brown said in a press conference Friday morning. “Other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger. The suspect is deceased … He’s been deceased because of a detonation of the bomb.”
• The government is classifying too many documents.
• Texas bureaucrats propose new rule mandating burial or cremation of fetal remains:
The proposal would no longer allow abortion providers to dispose of fetal tissue as medical waste in sanitary landfills. Instead it would require that all remains be either cremated or interred. Renee Clack, director of Health Care Quality Section, determined that the new disposal methods would not require small clinics to incur additional costs, according to the Texas Register. However, the clinics currently dispose of medical waste through a third-party waste disposal service, so finding a way to comply with the regulation will at least result in an administrative burden.
The rules would apply to all fetal remains, regardless of gestation stage.
• Yet another murderous attack by ISIS in Iraq: The extremist ISIS, also known as Islamic State, has claimed responsibility for the triple suicide attack Thursday evening near a Shia mausoleum north of Baghdad. At least 36 people were killed and more than 60 others were wounded, Iraqi authorities told media. The mausoleum is that of Sayyid Muhammad bin Ali al-Hadi, the son of the 10th imam revered by Shia Muslims. Many pilgrims to the mausoleum were there to celebrate Eid-al-Fitr, the end of the Ramadan month of fasting to mark what Muslims believe was the first revelation of the Koran to Muhammad. The attack was one of a string of recent suicide bombings that have officials and the Iraqi populace fearful that the sectarian fight between Shias and Sunnis in Iraq may be escalating, according to The Guardian.
• Remembering the “meow wars” in the history of trolling:
Twenty years ago, throughout 1996 and beyond, the “Meow Wars” waged on Usenet. Popular at universities, the non-centralised computer network consisted of news groups for specific topics and file sharing. “Meowers,” as the early trolls were known, flooded these boards and derailed them with blocks of text, posting quotes fromMonty Python or Beavis and Butthead, personal insults, and nonsense exchanges about a cat named Fluffy. The resulting conflict was a landmark in internet history, and possibly the birth of trolling as we know it.
• Dept. of Interior discovers bolts securing subsea oil wells are failing:
General Electric Co., oil drillers and U.S. regulators are scrambling to determine why massive bolts used to connect subsea oil equipment keep failing, prompting costly shutdowns and raising safety concerns about hundreds of wells in the Gulf of Mexico.
Safety regulators at the Department of the Interior began investigating the matter in 2013, officials said in an interview, after a GE oil-exploration equipment business issued a global recall for faulty bolts on one of its components. The bolts have corroded and sometimes snapped, raising the possibility of a major oil leak.
• On today's Kagro in the Morning show: Third day in a row under the cloud of a shooting. Trump camp puts on a clinic of crazy: attacking GOP Senators, Ivanka for VP & maybe The Donald will just skip the whole thing. Sign of the times: the booming active shooter countermeasures industry.
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