Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Here are three videos and several articles on October 7 that are worth watching and reading.
First, one from Coleman Hughes: “Inside Israel’s war room: what really happened after October 7.” (Subtitle: “Israel’s leaders hated one another. They fought a war anyway. Elliot Kaufman takes us inside the room where it happened.”) Kaufman is an editor of the Wall Street Journal, and imparts a number of facts about the war (and subsequent “peace”) that haven’t been widely reported. It’s a long conversation, and I haven’t yet finished, but Kaufman is eloquent, Hughes asks good questions (as usual), and you’ll learn a lot.
Click to watch it (now on YouTube):
Free on YouTube: “Israel regained deterrence. The U.S. lost it.” Bret Stephens is interviewed by Times of Israel editor deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan about all manner of Israel-related items: the war, why Israel won despite losing world approbation, the Democrats vs. the Republicans on Israel, is the New York Times anti-Israel?, and so on. The one bit that irritated me was when Borschel-Dan asks Stephens whether the NYT is anti-Israel. It of course is, but Stephens weasels a bit, which he probably has to do to keep his job. Otherwise, it’s a good conversation.
A short video of Natasha Hausdorff being interviewed on October 7 by Julia Hartley-Brewer. Note the two big truths that Hausdorff says have been neglected by the media but which we must recognize.
The front page of the Free Press is loaded with articles appropriate for this day. You’ll have to subscribe to read any, though. Note the ones at upper left and lower right, which go against the prevailing narrative.
As the grim third anniversary of October 7 befalls a decimated Gaza Strip, the state of the discourse among many in the so-called “pro-Palestine” movement remains as embarrassing, dismal, and disastrous as it was when Hamas initiated the attack in 2023. Over the past three years, I have seen countless posts by self-described Zionists criticizing the conduct of Israel’s government, the behavior of Israeli officials, and the excesses of the Israeli reaction to October 7. And yet, I have struggled to see even a dozen posts by “pro-Palestine” activists, advocates, or organizations explicitly condemning Hamas for triggering the most catastrophic chapter in contemporary Palestinian history.
And let’s be clear: That’s exactly what this is. Three years after October 7, the Palestinian people face their greatest crisis of the modern era.
I begin on the ground, in Gaza itself. The majority of Gaza’s buildings are partially or fully destroyed. Tens of thousands have lost their lives, including entire families wiped out by ferocious Israeli bombardment. People will argue to the moon and back about who was ultimately responsible for the level of devastation in Gaza. I personally believe Israel killed far too many civilians, including dozens of my own family members. Israeli air strikes destroyed both of my childhood homes. I will never not be angry or upset about this.
But I will also forever be furious at the fact that Gaza would still be standing had Hamas simply kept its terrorists at home on October 7. I will forever be rageful at the fact that Hamas not only weaponized every aspect of Gaza’s infrastructure but also held Israeli hostages in a manner that was inevitably going to invite more devastation and suffering for Palestinian civilians. I will forever be resentful of the useful idiots who ignored Hamas’s sadistic tactics, hiding behind vacuous appeals to “international law” despite there being no legal framework to justify a terrorist group entrenching itself in medical facilities, educational spaces, markets, and areas meant to shelter the displaced.
. . . In other words, three years after the October 7 attacks on Israel, Palestinians have seen their homes decimated, their reputations destroyed in both Israel and the Arab world, and the actions of their supposed allies in the West amount to nothing. Yes, this has been the most catastrophic three years in modern Palestinian history.
However, a narrative shift is of paramount importance. To promote a fundamentally different future for the Palestinian people in Gaza and beyond, we must acknowledge that within the massive power differential between Israel and the Palestinians, there exists an immense margin for Palestinian agency, responsibility, and accountability. Recognizing that is far from “blaming the victims,” as many of my detractors allege; it is, in fact, the first step toward empowering the Palestinian people.
Each day’s news is filled with declarations of defeat. The online world is filled with shrill declarations that Israel has lost this war.
But as we approach the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks, I stand by what I wrote here this time last year: that Israel and her allies have been winning the war on the ground even as they have lost the PR war around the world. The PR war matters. But it matters less than the war itself. Better to win the ground war and lose the PR war than the other way around.
Three years after the attack that Yahya Sinwar started, it is worth reiterating the successes of the nation he tried to defeat—and the utter decimation of the people who started this war.
. . .Once the mullahs [in Iran] had deliverable nuclear weapons, they believed they would be invincible—effectively able to continue repressing the Iranian people for the indefinite future and hold not just the Middle East but also the wider world by the throat. That was, effectively, what their mouthpieces in the Western media wanted. Only one great miscalculation prevented them from getting there: Sinwar’s launch of the October 7 attacks.
With the hindsight of three years of war, we can now see more clearly how complete the devastation of Iran’s plans has been. Piece by piece, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu took apart the Iranian axis.
First, they took apart Hamas in Gaza. They did this despite constant attempts to make them stop, which came not just from the negligibly important “allies” in Europe but from President Joe Biden’s White House. Throughout the years during which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attempted to finish its mission in Gaza, the Biden administration consistently tried to pull it back. But the Israeli government refused. Even as Kamala Harris declared that she had “studied the maps” and the hashtag “All eyes on Rafah” went global online, the IDF went into Hamas’s last stronghold. There they cornered Sinwar and killed the mastermind of the attacks. There was no “massacre” in Rafah, as the online world had predicted. There was simply another Israeli victory.
People will beef at Murray’s praise of Netanyahu, but there’s a nice ending, referring to last week’s failed hijacking attempt of a FlyDubai airplane:
Sinwar was a psychopath, and so he probably would have launched his war anyway. But by any analysis, what he started on October 7 was one of the greatest military missteps in history. Everybody alongside and above him in the chain of command is now dead. Neither Hamas, Hezbollah, nor the Iranian regime has a noose ready to pull around Israel’s neck anymore. Three years ago, this set of victories would have seemed unthinkable. Today, it is an average day’s news. That a large share of the Israeli hostages who Hamas claimed on October 7 were eventually returned alive is an additional victory worthy of scripture.
Only one part of the war has been lost, and that is the war for public opinion—especially among the young. That is both concerning and unsurprising. The terrorist-linked regime in Qatar, among others, has been superb at using its mouthpieces at Al Jazeera and other, more covert propaganda channels to influence global opinion. These outlets started making false claims that Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza beginning in October 2023. Sadly, large parts of the world have believed this lie, and weak governments like that of the UK have decided to pander to a part of their domestic political base by repeating and feeding it.
In the years ahead, that will be their problem. But for the time being, what happened in the skies above Saudi Arabia on Wednesday morning stands as a metaphor for three years of war. The Israelis saw an existential threat, took matters into their own hands, and decided their own course. The rest of the West will have to decide whether it will follow the Israeli model or let its own future be dictated by terror and the hijacking of its entire society.
*****************
From It’s Noon in Israel; click the headline below to read. Tatarka and Segal paints two worlds: the “Nova world” described this way:
The Nova world is a world of good and evil. Evil is the entity that raped and pillaged its way through the Gaza envelope, kidnapped 251 people and sacrificed Gazans on the altar of its deity, death. It is the militia that fired on the north and drove tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes. And it is the regime in Tehran that armed and funded them both, the Great Satan of this world.
and the “October 8 world”, in which Israel is the evil and hapless entity:
The other world dates its birth to October 8, omitting the day its ideology won its greatest victory and its goals were realized: October 7. This “October 8” world has even fewer shades of gray than the Nova world. Its black is Israel, the unholy nation, the spearhead of Western colonialism and the last obstacle to the world’s redemption. Its white is the Gazans, victims of oppression and genocide, who have replaced Jews as the archetypal persecuted other. It has adopted the jihadist’s categories: “settlers” and Israelis are one and the same, as are terrorists and civilians.
An excerpt:
Reality conforms to neither narrative entirely.
The hostages have come home. Hamas is shattered, Hezbollah decapitated, Assad gone, and Iran struggling for breath. By almost any military measure, Israel has never been stronger. And yet France, the U.K., Canada and Australia have recognized a Palestinian state, and visitors to the Netherlands are having their bags rifled through for products from Judea and Samaria.
That does not make the two worlds equally wrong. The October 8 world’s distortions are too many to count. The most fundamental is its refusal to see non-Westerners as actors in their own right. In its telling, every event is written in Jerusalem or Washington. Hamas didn’t choose to attack; it was provoked. Hezbollah didn’t choose to open a second front, and Iran didn’t choose to build an axis; they were simply defending themselves from Israeli aggression.
The Nova world’s error is subtler, and for Israel, more dangerous. Before October 7, Israel fell for a conceptzia of safety: the belief that Hamas was deterred, contained, and bought off. Three years later, it risks the opposite, a conceptzia of unsafety, in which every threat is existential and every problem is answered with force. Israel has become a hammer in search of nails. This complicated region is fluent in the language of force, but it is not monolingual, and those who insist Israel speak only that language will miss the larger opportunities its military victories have created.
Criticizing the Nova world is not the same as doubting it. On the question that matters most, it was right: evil is real. Today, three years on, a letter by an officer of Shayetet 13, the Israeli Navy’s special forces unit, has been published. I will let it speak for itself.
Just recently we were talking about chirality (“handedness”) in the molecules of life: organisms use only L amino acids in proteins and D sugars in the DNA ladder, although opposite-handed molecules exist. Why is this? For a while chemists have been trying to create a preference in “one handed” molecules via chemical reactions. And the two who just won the Chemistry Nobel Prize, Kenso Soai and Henri Kagan, succeeded. The Nobel Prize site gives a brief explanation:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai “for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.”
Henri Kagan discovered a new way of manipulating chemical reactions, allowing a greater excess of one of the mirror images to be created than was previously assumed possible. His discovery has been revolutionary for chemists who develop reactions for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, flavours, scents and new materials.
Kenso Soai designed the first chemical reaction in which only one of the potential mirror images was formed. Other than life itself, no one had ever achieved this feat. The Soai reaction is one of the most spectacular chemical experiments ever conducted.
Molecules can exist in mirror images of themselves—left- and right-handed versions. Yet the stuff of life, from the amino acids in our proteins to the sugars in DNA, has evolved a preference for one-handedness, or chirality. Why this asymmetry arose has long been a mystery, because ordinary chemical reactions tend to produce equal amounts of the two mirror images.
Today’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry honors Henri Kagan of the University of Paris-Sud and Kenso Soai of the Tokyo University of Science for discovering how chemistry can break that symmetry—and for providing clues to how life’s one-handed chemistry might have emerged.
“Their discoveries led to a chemical reaction that spontaneously, without the involvement of other chiral molecules, creates only one mirror image,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Prize Committee for Chemistry, said at a press conference this morning where the award was announced. “This is the first time this had happened since the processes that led to the chirality of life billions of years ago.”
For decades, drugmakers had struggled to create chemical reactions that would produce a one-handed form of a drug—a problem because mirror-image forms of the same drug molecule can have very different biological effects. For example, the right-handed drug Darvon is an opioid painkiller, whereas its left-handed form, Novrad, is a cough medicine. (The names are mirror images of each other as well.)
Chemists had long assumed that the handedness of a catalyst—a compound that speeds up a chemical reaction—would be transferred linearly to the molecules it produced. But in 1986, Kagan showed that wasn’t necessarily so. When left- and right-handed versions of a catalyst were mixed, he found, they formed combinations that behaved differently: Some barely drove the reaction at all. As a result, a small imbalance in the catalyst could produce a much larger imbalance in the product—a phenomenon known as a nonlinear effect. The discovery gave chemists a new way to drive reactions with a preference for one particular molecular handedness.
Soai put the idea into practice. In 1995, he showed that a reaction could amplify a tiny initial excess of one mirror image. Starting with just 2% excess, he ended with 87%. He continued to look for ways to improve, and in 2003, he demonstrated a reaction that could snowball on itself, amplifying a tiny, chance imbalance between the two mirror images, until more than 99% of the product had the same handedness.
“Taken together, the groundbreaking discoveries by Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have reshaped our understanding of molecular chirality, how it is created, amplified, and transmitted,” prize committee member Peter Somfai said at the press conference.
We don’t yet have a theory why, say, L-amino acids predominate in life, but it could have been due to an initial tiny asymmetry that was amplified in the way described above, making one kind of amino acid more available for protein synthesis. As we discussed recently, “mirror life” made of opposite-handed molecules, like D amino acids, might pose dangers to the planet.
Here are the two mirror-image forms (called “isomers”) of the amino acid alanine, which cannot be superimposed on each other.
By the way, we don’t yet have 20 entries in our guess-the-Nobels-in-Literature-and-Peace prize, and if we don’t get to that limit before the deadline (5 p.m. Chicago time today), the contest is canceled. What a sad site this has become!
Welcome to Wednesday, October 7, 2026 a Hump Day (“Dita e mesit të javës” in Albanian), as well as Random Acts of Poetry Day. Here’s my appropriation of a real poet; do you know who it is? It is a fragment of a longer poem, but this fragment is about the writer’s cat. It’s long, so skip it if you’re ailurophobic. Answer at the bottom of the post.
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he’s a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually—Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.
It is also, of course, the third anniversary of the genocidal attack on southern Israel by Palestinian terrorists, killing at least 1,195 people, including 828 civilians. You can expect widespread celebration by the haters today. This Times of Israel article gives the gist (click to read):
From the article:
As Israeli and Jewish communities around the world mark the third anniversary of the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led invasion and massacre in southern Israel, 262 pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests and events have been identified in 37 countries, the Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Ministry said.
The events are planned through October 14, with 121 scheduled for October 10-11, the ministry said, citing data from its J-SOC (National Center for Combating Antisemitism). On October 7 itself, 75 demonstrations are planned worldwide.
. . .The United States has the largest number of planned events, with 45, followed by Spain with 40, the ministry said. Australia expects to see 21 protests, the UK 19, and Italy 16. Germany and Canada each will have 14, while France will have 10, and the Netherlands eight.
Of the 262 events, 21 have been classified as high-risk and 66 as medium-risk.
And just to remember what these morons are celebrating, here’s one of the Jewish victims from October 7. Be sure to read the whole message from Libi:
OCTOBER 7, 2023: SHE KNEW SHE WAS GOING TO DIE.
Libi Cohen-Meguri, a 22-year-old infantry officer, went to the Nova music festival.
She was shot while fleeing the party. At 8:11 a.m., she called her parents and said:
“I’ve been shot in the stomach, I’ve been shot in the arm, I’m losing blood. I’m going to die.”
Calmly, quietly, she understood; these were the last minutes of her life.
She asked her parents to call Tomer, her twin brother, and Maya, her little sister, and said:
“I’m going to die. I just want you to listen to me.
I love you, Yariv. You’re the best father I could have asked for.
Mom, stop screaming. Just listen to me. You are the best mother we could have ever had. Don’t forget to be a good mother to Tomer and Maya after I die.
Tomer, how lucky we were to live this life together. I love you.
My Maya, never forget—you are the treasure of my life.”
When she finished speaking, her parents told her to get out of the car, lie down on the road, and pretend to be dead.
With her last bit of strength, she got out of the car and laid down on the road.
“Mom, they’re coming to shoot me again,” Libi said after lying down.
While her mother listened on the phone, shouts in Arabic could be heard, and then a barrage of gunfire.
It didn’t stop.
It kept going, until the call was disconnected.
And that’s how Libi died—with demonic beasts from the pit of hell standing over her and emptying a full magazine into her body.
Libi died with LOVE on her lips: love for life, love for her family, and love for her people.
Her memory will forever be a blessing.
NEVER FORGET.
NEVER FORGIVE.
NEVER AGAIN IS NOW.
Israel is hunting down every single Palestinian and Hamas terrorist who participated in the October 7th Massacre—to kill them all.
They’re living on “borrowed time,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
Sooner or later, every one of these monsters will be found and eliminated.
Eva Marie Saint, who starred in Elia Kazan’s 1954 On the Waterfront and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 North by Northwest, died Tuesday at 102 years old.
Saint grew up in Albany and Delmar, New York. She was a delicate, porcelain beauty. She attended the Actors Studio in New York, performed on Broadway and did live television in the late 1940s. But Saint didn’t do a film until she was almost 30, after director Elia Kazan suggested she screen test with a guy named Marlon Brando. They did a scene from On the Waterfront in which Saint is supposed to keep Brando out of her house.
In 2000, Saint told WHYY’s Fresh Air, “I don’t know what happened, but … [Brando] came in the living room. We were dancing, we were laughing, I was crying. He was taking my skirt and … whipping it around, and the sparks flew. And Kazan saw that. And suddenly I was in On the Waterfront.”
In that film, Saint plays Edie, a Catholic schoolgirl who finds herself in the middle of union corruption in Hoboken, N.J. When her longshoreman brother is murdered, Edie wants justice. Saint won an Oscar for performance.
Below is one of the very famous scenes from that movie, one in which Brando and Saint have their first date. Brando, playing failed boxer Terry Molloy, was partly responsible for the death of Joey, the sister of Edie Doyle, played by Saint, but she doesn’t know it. The acting in this scene is unparalleled. Watch Brando look around, play the tough guy, and then melt when Saint puts her hands on his face. The whole movie comprises such acting (including the “I could have been a contender” scene), and, according to Wikipedia,
On the Waterfront was a critical and commercial success and is considered one of the greatest films ever made and is said to revolve around the subject matter of alienation at the lowest social level. It received twelve Academy Award nominations and won eight, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Brando, Best Supporting Actress for Saint, and Best Director for Kazan. In 1998, it was ranked by the American Film Institute as the eighth-greatest American movie of all time; in AFI’s 2007 list, it was ranked 19th. It is Bernstein’s only original film score not adapted from a stage production with songs.
Demonstrations swept across France on Tuesday as labor unions rallied in solidarity with high school students who have spent two weeks blockading schools to protest understaffing, overcrowded classrooms and dilapidated buildings.
Marches were held in more than 40 cities, from Caen in the north to Marseille in the south, as activists, teachers, parents and university students joining swelling protests that have spread to hundreds of schools across the country. Tuesday’s marches drew roughly 256,000 people, according to the Interior Ministry; a major union said the figure was more than twice that many.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu signaled that the government had heard the protesters’ demands and was taking them seriously. He also said regular classes would be “completely suspended” on Thursday and Friday so that principals could host sessions with students.
The protests on Tuesday were mostly peaceful, but a fire was started in Lyon and police officers unleashed tear gas in Nantes. The biggest march was in Paris, where the Interior Ministry said there were 56,000 demonstrators.
The demonstrations are a litmus test of the longevity of a protest movement that began late last month in the suburbs of Paris and quickly spread to hundreds of schools across France.
While the causes of the chaos may appear disparate, they can be traced to a common root: France’s two-decade-long struggle to fund its state, now exacerbated by high borrowing costs, surging fuel prices and political uncertainty, with jockeying underway to replace President Emmanuel Macron next spring.
French public finances, already fragile, continue to deteriorate, fanning fears in financial markets that France could be the next European country to tumble into a full-blown financial crisis. The fiscal jitters were amplified by recent polls that show the far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, would beat all her rivals in presidential elections that will be held next spring.
On Tuesday, teachers and other public workers plan rallies against proposed wage freezes as the government labors to pass a budget. They will join thousands of students who have blockaded schools to protest underfunding that has led to crumbling facilities and a shortage of teachers.
As far as I can determine, immigration has no direct connection with this save that the school protests began in areas that were relatively poor and had a high proportion (about 30% of immigrants.
On Monday afternoon, Taylor was one of about a dozen speakers at a “Justice for Survivors” protest blasting Cornell for perpetuating a culture that allows rape to go unpunished.
Their fury was on behalf of Jane Doe, the anonymous student who filed a September 14 lawsuit alleging that seven male students gang-raped her at a fraternity house in 2024. The student, then 20 years old, initially described the evening—including her drinking and use of a dissociative drug called ketamine—as voluntary and consensual. Then, more than two weeks after the alleged incident, with rumors about her in full swirl on campus, Jane Doe requested a rape kit at a local emergency room. At the time, the Tompkins County district attorney declined to bring charges in relation to the case based on a statement Jane Doe had given to university police, finding the description of her participation to be “voluntary, conscious, and consensual.”
The case has since exploded far beyond Ithaca, dividing the country as it wrestles with some of the thorniest questions that remain nearly a decade after #MeToo: What happens when a woman comes to understand a sexual encounter as rape in retrospect? How relevant should a woman’s alcohol and drug consumption be in determining consent? And should the names of the accused men be public given they have not been charged with a crime?
That nuance was hard to come by from the speakers at the rally, which at times felt like a mash-up of the left-wing causes of the last decade—from Black Lives Matter to the anti-Israel movement that roiled college campuses during the spring of 2024. One Cornell attendee banged on a drum while wearing a ski mask and hoodie reading “Viva Palestina Libre.” Protesters chanted “no justice, no peace.”
Athena Holloway, a senior majoring in public policy, took the stage to detail the ways that Cornell had not only failed her, but humanity. When she first came to the university, she was excited, she said.
“I believed I had found a place where every person could belong, where any person could be protected,” she bellowed, as protesters raised signs with messages like “I DON’T WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL WITH RAPISTS.” “So imagine the disappointment of discovering what can happen when that any person needs help,” Holloway continued.
She then harked back to moments in the school’s past where she believed the institution had stood on the wrong side of history, including in 1969, when black students wielding guns took over a campus building to demand a stronger black studies program. Holloway, who described herself as a “low-income, first-generation” student, encouraged students to think of their struggles as connected.
“Race matters!” she blared. “Gender matters! Sexuality matters! Class matters! Disability matters, immigration status matters! Power matters!”
This was not a crowd that used the terms accused or alleged. To almost all attendees, the seven men named in the lawsuit—and not yet tried in a court of law—were guilty.
The last part is what bothered me—the rush to judgment, declaring all seven accused men of being guilty. It’s clear that the University didn’t perform due diligence on the accusations, but what exactly went awry in the reporting process is not clear to me. It’s a sign of the times that for many an accusation equals guilt equals conviction, but as far as I know, no matter what people think, guilt must still be established by the justice system, and withstand reasonable doubt.
Before ascending the ranks of academia, Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff demonstrated against the Vietnam War and earned a literature degree at the University of Pennsylvania. Weeks before he graduated in 1973, women occupied the school’s College Hall to protest leaders’ response to a series of reported rapes.
Now at another Ivy League university, Kotlikoff finds himself in the midst of rising uproar over campus sexual-assault allegations—and this time, he is the leader in the hot seat.
Kotlikoff, who at 75 is the oldest president to lead Cornell, has spent most of his two-year tenure battling crises. His predecessor stepped down in 2024 amid controversy over elite schools’ handling of pro-Palestinian protests. Then came the Trump administration’s accusations of antisemitism and liberal excess, and the disruption of federal funding.
Now, a lawsuit alleging an undergraduate was gang raped and drugged at a Cornell fraternity house in 2024—and that the school didn’t do enough to protect her—has ignited a new crisis on campus.
Monday afternoon, hundreds of Cornell students gathered near the school’s famous clock tower and marched through campus in protest. On Tuesday, the gender and sexuality studies program is sponsoring a town hall. Wednesday, Cornell’s chapter of the NAACP is asking students to boycott classes and join a seven-hour sit-in, the duration of time for which Jane Doe says she was sexually assaulted.
Members of the Faculty Senate are preparing a vote of no confidence in the ability of central administration “to effectively address the ongoing crisis of sexual assault,” according to a draft resolution.
Kotlikoff addressed the Cornell community in an eight-minute video over the weekend. “I want to acknowledge something that can be difficult for an institution to say,” he said. “We don’t have all the answers.”
He called this time a “defining moment in Cornell’s history” and pledged to be more transparent about the investigation. He promised a serious look at campus Greek life: “We owe it to Jane Doe.”
With a vote of no confidence passing, Kotlikoff is toast, regardless of what happens to the accused rapists. Of course if he played any role in keeping the case away from the local authorities, then things would be much clearer. One thing is sure: we can’t let student unrest adjudicate this case.
*As you know, Britain’s Green Party voted a big anti-Israel motion, deeming Zionism “racism,” accusing Israel of genocide, and, worse, calling for a “one state solution” to the Israel/Palestine problem, which would lead to a huge genocide—by Hamas. The Guardian reports that this had led to ostracism of the English and Welsh Greens from the European Greens. (Four of the five British MP’s in the Greens opposed the hateful policy.)
The English and Welsh Greens are facing international ostracism after adopting a policy declaring Zionism as a form of racism, which has drawn dismay from the group representing European Greens.
The co-leader of the German Greens separately said the policy was “intolerable and unacceptable”, running contrary to its belief in the right of Israel to exist.
The policy says Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state, should be “treated as any other form of racism”, and backs a single democratic Palestinian state across historic Palestine “with equal rights for all”.
The European Green party, which represents 47 parties, including the Green party of England and Wales (GPEW), said it supported a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, and the new motion went against this.
The alliance “will immediately demand clarity from the leadership and parliamentary group of GPEW, to understand the official party policy of GPEW, how they position themselves towards the self-determination of Israelis and Jews as well as the protection of Jewish people and members in the party”, it said in a statement.
Felix Banaszak, the leader of the German Greens, known formally as Alliance 90/the Greens, told a press conference the motion was “intolerable and unacceptable”.
“It runs counter to everything that Alliance 90/the Greens stands for in Germany, and it also runs counter to what the European Green party stands for,” he added.
Banaszak said: “There is a widely held view within the European Green party that Israel has a right to exist and that this right must not be undermined.” His party would “approach our partner parties in Europe to clarify how to deal with this”.
Sandy Ruthven, the chair of Amnesty International UK’s charitable trust and a longstanding Green member, resigned over the motion and accused the party of failing to confront antisemitism.
Frankly, I’m very surprised at this given the growing antisemitism in Europe. But it’s not clear if the European Greens object only to the “one-state” policy (yes, in the British Greens a members’ vote is policy), or also to the Zionism = racism and the Israeili “genocide” lie.
Large language models are diffusing rapidly into science, raising concerns that delegating research writing to AI may undermine the development of expertise that scientific training is supposed to build. We measure AI-generated writing in the dissertations of a near-census of US STEM PhD graduates from 2019 to 2026 and link graduates to their subsequent employment. AI writing is absent before 2023, present in 29% of dissertations filed in 2026, and rapidly growing. Use is more common among students from non-English-speaking countries and at lower-ranked programs. Among graduates in the same program and cohort, those whose dissertations contain AI writing are less likely to enter academic research careers and more likely to enter non-tenure-track roles or industry, with this pattern strongest among US-origin students. At the same time as AI may increase research productivity, it thus appears to also be displacing a potentially important portion of the work through which scientific expertise is developed.
Here are some tweets showing, first, the growing number of STEM dissertations that have AI writing. Remember that the importance of a Ph.D. in STEM is research results and not writing, but it’s still unethical to have AI write part of your dissertation:
My findings have replicated!
A new paper found basically the same result I did: somewhere between 1-in-4 and 1-in-3 dissertations are now written with AI! https://t.co/h8kuznE0kF
And the graph showing, for both foreign (red) and American (green) Ph.D. graduates, the higher probability of going into industry than academia if you have a dissertation containing AI writing. (There is less of a disparity for foreign students.) It’s substantial, and I have a couple of theories for it, but you can think of your own:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the editor and Andrzej are messing around:
Hili: You look very tired. Andrzej: You’re right. I think I need to stop pretending I’m working.
In Polish:
Hili: Wyglądasz jakbyś był bardzo zmęczony.
Ja: Masz rację, chyba muszę przestać udawać, że pracuję.
From Masih. This brave Iranian woman risks her own freedom by relating what she sees:
A woman who runs a small shop near an Iranian prison sees two worlds unfold at its gates every day.
She sees families embracing loved ones who have finally been released, smiling through tears of joy. And she sees families summoned for one final visit with someone sentenced to death, holding back tears as they face an unbearable goodbye.
Behind those prison walls, people lose months and years of their lives in a system where fair trials, independent lawyers and even the most basic rights of defendants are routinely denied. Forced confessions, torture and closed-door trials have been documented time and again.
The people of Iran are being held hostage by this brutal and terrorist regime. They need the world to stand with them.
A Canadian man who had two rats as pets learned that letting them drive a miniature car reduced their levels of stress, so he gave them an electric miniature car and taught them to drive.
Every once in a while I like to reread this statement by the DSA and specifically one Zohran Mamdani, on October 7, 2023. Never forget. https://t.co/rfVv6CZ84C
And two from Doctor Cobb. First, a baby bobcat rescues itself. You can see some video here.
Not your typical 'cat stuck in a tree' call. A baby bobcat got stuck on the top of a power pole in Kelowna. He waited until the rescue man reached him in the lift and said, "No thanks, I got it," and shimmied down himself. 😂🤣www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/ar…
The poem at the top is a fragment from Jubilate Agno, by Christopher Smart (1722-1771). Smart wrote this while confined in a mental asylum, but it’s none the worse for that. It is in fact, one of the two best poems ever written about a cat.
In the past few years these contests often lacked winners, so I’m increasing your chances this year by eliminating the sciences and economics from the guesses (two science prizes have already been awarded). The Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced Thursday, October 8, and the Peace Prize on the next day. I’m asking you to guess the winners of both, to wit:
Guess the names of the winners of the Nobel Prizes for Literature and for Peace
Here are the Roolz:
a.) One guess per person in each category. If you name more than one person or group for each prize, your vote will be summarily discarded.
b.) Remember that organizations can be awarded the Peace Prize.
c.) To win, you must guess both correctly. But since the Literature Prize is almost never guessed correctly, if nobody gets both I will name as winner the first person to correctly guesses either of the two winners. If there are ties, the first guesser wins.
d.) DEADLINE: Wednesday, October 7 (tomorrow) at 5 p.m. Chicago time.
THE PRIZE: A mint paperback copy of either WEIT or Faith Versus Fact, autographed by the author and with a cat drawn in it to your specifications. (There is some flexibility here if you prefer another animals, but remember that I’m not an artist.) Since I cannot mail books internationally, they will be sent to a U.S. address of your choosing.
Note: if there are fewer than 20 people guessing, the contest is null and void due to lack of interest.
I completely missed the Nobel award in biology yesterday, but I see that one has been awarded this morning in physics. The former involves three scientists, the latter a lone physicist.
The Medicine or Physiology prize release is here. It describes advances in “optogenetics,” the use of optical signals to detect how neurons work. It’s very clever, based on an algal protein, rhodopsin, that is activated by light and, when put in a nerve cell, will create an impulse when the cell is illuminated by blue light.
There’s a clear discussion of the Prize-winning research at The Conversation (click below to read):
A summary:
Scientists who worked out how to control brain cells with light have won this year’s Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel were honoured for their research into “light-gated ion channels and optogenetics”.
Peter Hegemann, at Humboldt University of Berlin, and Georg Nagel, at the University of Würzburg, wanted to understand how a tiny, single-celled alga called Chlamydomonas senses light. Light-sensing is not unique to animals with eyes: organisms throughout the living world use light to detect their surroundings and respond to changes in their environment. Even single-cell organisms have proteins that respond to light. These proteins are used to move towards or away from light, to generate energy and to respond to the various demands of a 24-hour day.
Hegemann and Nagel discovered that Chlamydomonas has a beautifully ingenious mechanism of light detection that relies on a single protein called channelrhodopsin.
Channelrhodopsin is built into the outer membrane of the algal cell. Part of the protein faces the water outside the cell and part faces the inside. The protein also contains a small molecule called retinaldehyde, which is able to absorb light.
When light hits the retinaldehyde inside channelrhodopsin, it changes shape. This makes the channelrhodopsin protein change shape too. That change opens a tiny passage through the cell membrane. Positively charged particles, including sodium, can then flow from the water outside the alga into the cell. This movement of charged particles sends a signal inside the alga that helps it swim.
The researchers realised that if they could put channelrhodopsin into nerve cells, they might be able to switch those cells on simply by shining a light on them. That is exactly what Hegemann, Nagel and the third Nobel-prize winner, Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist and bioengineer at Stanford University in California, went on to do.
. . . and how it’s used, with a cool example:
The ability to control nerve cells with light is called optogenetics. It has become a powerful research tool because scientists can use it to switch specific groups of nerve cells on and off and see what happens.
First, scientists deliver the gene for channelrhodopsin to the nerve cells they want to study. The gene is usually carried into the cells by a virus that has been altered so that it cannot cause disease. The cells then make the channelrhodopsin protein, which makes them respond to light.
In animals such as mice, scientists can shine light into the brain through a thin optical fibre. When the light reaches the cells, channelrhodopsin opens and the cells become active. Nearby nerve cells that do not contain the protein are unaffected.
Light can be aimed at a very small part of the brain and switched on and off extremely quickly. This makes optogenetics a powerful way to investigate how the brain works. For example, if scientists want to know whether a particular group of nerve cells is involved in memory, sleep, sensation or movement, say, they can switch those cells on with light and see what happens.
In one experiment in 2012, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave mice a mild electric shock in a particular cage. They used optogenetics to tag the nerve cells in the brain’s memory centre that were active during that the fear-conditioning experiment. Days later, in a different cage, they switched those cells on with light. The mice froze in fear, as if they remembered the shock.
Mice that were not shocked did not freeze, which showed that the light was reactivating a specific memory. Deisseroth was one of the study’s authors.
***************************************
And the press release for the physics prize is here. An excerpt:
Francis Halzen realised that ice at the South Pole could be used to track particles known as neutrinos. His vision and scientific leadership have been fundamental for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory – a cubic kilometre of ice that is equipped with light sensors. Using IceCube, researchers can capture neutrinos from extremely energy-rich processes in the distant universe.
Neutrinos are everywhere, but they do not make themselves known. They pass all the way through the Earth and through our bodies without us noticing. Very rarely, a single neutrino will interact with an atomic nucleus, which makes it possible for someone with the right equipment to discover them.
Scientists have long known that the cosmos contains natural particle accelerators, which fire out particles with energies up to a million times more than can be achieved in laboratories on Earth. Much about these sources is mysterious: what are they, where are they, and what are the main processes inside them?
Neutrinos with extremely high energies are created in the same environments as other types of particles. However, unlike other particles, neutrinos reach us without changing direction or losing energy. This means they can provide information that is not available in any other way.
Francis Halzen first presented his vision for capturing neutrinos at the South Pole in 1988. When a neutrino collides with an atomic nucleus, it produces a flash of light that can be tracked by sensors in the clear glacial ice. The South Pole’s ice has many advantages, as it is free from various types of interference and the area is geologically stable, with no earthquakes. Halzen and his idea soon gained the support of other researchers and, just a few years later, preliminary testing was conducted on sensors in ice.
Cosmic neutrinos with extremely high energies are very rare, so an enormous volume of ice is needed to observe an adequate number of collisions. IceCube covers an entire cubic kilometre and was finished in 2011. Researchers soon discovered the first high-energy neutrinos and, a few years later, could publish their discovery of neutrinos that must originate far outside our solar system. The search for the universe’s neutrino sources could begin in earnest.
“Francis Halzen has led an international team of researchers and engineers who have provided us with a fantastic instrument. His tenacity and scientific vision has paved the way for a new kind of astronomy,” says Mark Pearce, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
The neutrino interactions that are continuously collected by IceCube will provide researchers with novel knowledge about the violent settings in which high-energy neutrinos can be created – and could even reveal previously unknown cosmic phenomena.
Here’s the apparatus and how it works, taken from the Nobel Prize press release. See if you can read it by clicking to enlarge. The observed ice and detectors are buried way underground. Just getting this damn thing set up at the South Pole would merit a prize by itself!
Now perhaps some reader with expertise can tell us in the comments why high-energy neutrinos from outside the solar system are so important compared to lower-energy neutrinos from, say, the Sun.
Welcome to The Cruelest Day, Tuesday, October 6, 2026, and National Noodle Day. Here’s a bowl of hearty beef noodle soup that I had in Hong Kong ten years ago. It’s a famous dish there, and I went to a place that specialized in it:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 6 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The Supreme Court’s new term began yesterday, and it’s expected to adjudicate about 60 cases in this session. The NYT morning newsletter describes three important ones:
First up, with arguments today, is a major environmental case about whether state law can be used to hold companies liable for the costs of climate change. It pits the city and county of Boulder, Colo., against Suncor Energy and Exxon Mobil, companies those government entities say concealed the risks of climate change.
If the justices agree, the companies would have to reimburse Boulder for damages from wildfires, floods and other extreme weather. If they don’t, the ruling would have wide impact — dozens of other cities, counties, states and tribal governments around the country have filed similar suits seeking billions of dollars from energy companies.
St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy
In November, the court will hear a case brought by the Archdiocese of Denver that challenges Colorado rules requiring preschools that receive public funding to accept the children of gay and transgender parents.
The archdiocese and two Catholic schools argue that doing so would be at odds with church teachings — but that excluding its schools from public funding would violate the First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.
Lower courts have upheld the Colorado law on the grounds that the state could require participating schools to abide by its anti-discrimination rules, so long as the requirements are applied to all schools and without regard to religion. And so here we are.
Viramontes v. Cook County
This one’s a blockbuster dealing with the question of whether state and local laws banning semiautomatic rifles violate the Constitution, a subject that the court has avoided for years.
The case, slated for oral argument on Dec. 2, concerns Illinois and Connecticut, but the decision could seal the fate of similar laws around the country aimed at restricting the ownership of military-style rifles, such as the AR-15.
It’s a deeply polarizing subject. AR-15-style rifles are among the most popular long guns in the United States. People hunt with them, shoot them for sport, derive comfort from having one in the name of personal safety. They’ve also been used in mass shootings, including in both the Sandy Hook and Uvalde elementary school massacres.
Those who support the bans point to those catastrophes, and characterize the rifles as unusually dangerous. They argue that their restriction is an important use of governmental power to ensure the safety of the public.
Opponents say such bans violate citizens’ right to bear arms. They cite a judicial precedent of “common use” to argue that a gun that tens of millions of Americans use lawfully cannot be banned anyway.
My quick take on these three cases in order: 1. seems unworkable, 2. schools getting publis funding should accept those children, and 3. military-style rifles should be restricted. If not, how can they restrict automatic weapons, grenade launchers, or tanks? You could argue that all of those are permissible under the Second Amendment since they might be useful in a “well regulated militia”.
The U.S. removed all its B-1 bombers from the U.K.’s RAF Fairford air base, a decision made because of security concerns over suspected plots to attack the facility, American officials said Sunday.
The decision represents a shift for the U.S., which has used the military base northwest of London as a hub for launching bomber strikes in Iran. Until their recent departure, a dozen B-1s had been stationed at the base.
“While operational security precluded us from confirming the movement of our assets and forces in real-time, we can acknowledge now that all U.S. bombers that were deployed to RAF Fairford have redeployed to their home stations in the United States,” the Pentagon said in a statement, adding that the U.S. bombers remain ready to carry out attacks from the U.S. The U.K. Ministry of Defense declined to comment.
The decision follows the arrest of six suspects in connection with a suspected attack on the base that U.S. and British officials said was foiled last Sunday. U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said there were “strong indications” that Iran played a role in the incident, which was shrouded in mystery after the U.K. released the suspects on bail but continued to investigate the situation.
U.S. officials were aware of an Iran-linked plot to attack the bomber aircraft and kill personnel at the base, The Wall Street Journal has reported. A branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had recruited U.K. nationals to carry out the plot, which involved multiple steps including a diversion in the neighborhood nearby, according to a senior U.S. official.
In the U.K., authorities are still trying to piece together what happened, and some U.K. officials question the level of sophistication of the planned attack.
And here’s what the WSJ says in the link above about the plan, which in fact does seem to have involved attacks on the bombers:
U.S. officials were aware of an Iran-linked plot to attack the bomber aircraft and kill personnel at the base, according to an official familiar with the intelligence. A branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had recruited U.K. nationals to carry out the plot, which involved multiple steps including a diversion in the neighborhood nearby, an official said.
I’m glad the plot was foiled, though information has been notably slow in coming. Why were the suspects released if they were planning acts of terrorism?
*To its shame, the Green Party of the UK has adopted a motion that Zionism is racism, that Israel is committing genocide, and, worst of all, there should be a “one-state” solution, which of course means the elimination of Israel. By Party protocol, these now become official positions of the Green Party. (Bolding is mine):
Britain’s Green Party voted on Sunday to class Zionism as a form of racism, drawing criticism from British Jews and from the Israeli government which said it now viewed the party as “a body that gives legitimacy to terrorism.”
The party – which received 6% of the vote in national elections in 2024 – said it regarded Zionism as “an ethnonationalist political project” and repeated its call for Britain’s Labour government to end all arms trade with Israel.
“The motion also restates the Green Party’s backing for the right to self-determination and calls for the establishment of a single democratic state throughout historic Palestine,” the party said in a statement.
The definition of Zionism – which inspired the foundation of the modern state of Israel in the 20th century – and what it implies for the rights of non-Jews in Israel and neighbouring territory, is contentious. Jewish groups sometimes define it as a right to Jewish self-determination.
The Green Party motion passed by a majority of 1,022 to 813 despite opposition from many senior figures. Party leader Zack Polanski, who is seeking election to Parliament on Thursday in former Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s now-vacant London constituency, did not vote.
The result was condemned by British Jewish groups.
“The Green Party has made antisemitism party policy and become a racist party,” the Movement for Progressive Judaism said, adding that the support of some Jews for the motion did not mean it would not be used to discriminate against others.
. . .Mothin Ali, deputy leader of the Green Party and a supporter of the motion, told Sky News on Saturday that the heavy Palestinian death toll in Israel’s conflict with Hamas – which followed the Palestinian militant group’s deadly 2023 attack on an Israeli music festival – was the key context for the vote.
“The motion defines Zionism quite clearly. It defines it as an ethnonationalist movement. It defines it as ethnic cleansing. It defines it as genocide,” Ali said.
This is all complete lunacy, especially calling for the effective elimination of Israel via a one-state solution. We’ll see how many UK politicians or public figures will condemn this vote. According to the Guardian, four of the five Green Party members of Parliament oppose this policy. If you’re a Green, defend the policy, and its implicit call for the elimination of Israel, in the comments. If you can’t, you shouldn’t be a Green.
It’s Monday, October 5, and a few days ago, we believed that without the heroism of the passengers on Flight 1073, the almost 180 people aboard, 27 of them children, would have been killed. Now we know that without the bravery of Capt. Smit Machchhar, Yaniv Hayun, Tzvika Mans and Assaf Rajuan, we would be facing a catastrophe likely worse than October 7.
Under interrogation, Hamam al-Hammami, the Omani co-pilot, confessed that after killing the pilot his plan was to fly a normal landing approach and, in the final seconds, when interception was no longer possible, crash the plane into Ben Gurion Airport. That is why, rather than striking at the outset, he attacked the captain only once the plane was over Jordan.
The flight was due to land around 9:30 a.m., at the height of Sukkot, when traffic through the airport peaks. Tens of thousands of travelers would likely have been in the terminal when it arrived, and the death toll could easily have run into the thousands. Under interrogation, al-Hammami admitted that on previous trips to Israel he had “gathered information,” perhaps on where a crash would claim the most lives.
Had he managed to crash the plane into the Saudi desert, as we originally believed was his intention, the aftermath would have been catastrophic. The day would have gone down as the second-deadliest terror attack in Israel’s history, with nearly five times the death toll of the third. The central artery of the Abraham Accords, the 30-flight-a-day corridor, would have been severed, and the steadily warming relations between the Emirates and Israel would have frozen.
Had his original plan succeeded, it would have been, by a wide margin, the worst attack in Israel’s history, and it would have closed far more than one flight corridor. Even if the physical damage at Ben Gurion could be quickly repaired, no airline would risk flying to Israel. The country would face an aviation isolation worse than anything it experienced even at the peak after October 7.
. . . The most obvious and striking parallel is that Israel almost had its own 9/11, nearly exactly 25 years after the first. Not in the loose, figurative sense in which the phrase is so often used, but literally: a plane turned into a weapon, with a death toll that may have been comparable to that disaster, and far greater relative to Israel’s population. And the effect would have been even more disastrous. The World Trade Center was a symbolic target, while Ben Gurion is the heart of Israel’s connection to the outside world. It would have done more to isolate Israel from the world than any single Hamas attack.
I guess al-Hammami will be tried in the UAE and I hope he gets a stiff sentence. Israel has requested extradition because of the destination, but the UAE refused to send the suspect to Israel. The UAE does have strict laws against terrorism, though, and given that he’s likely to be convicted, his sentence wouldn’t be light.
Christa Pike has remained unconscious and on a ventilator at a hospital in the four days since her failed execution in Tennessee, and her prognosis might not be known for days more, one of her lawyers said Sunday.
Little has been released about Pike’s condition since Wednesday night’s execution attempt. She has since remained hospitalized under guard as doctors try to get the massive dose of the barbiturate pentobarbital out of her system.
When asked whether she ever regained consciousness after the execution attempt, Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell, Pike’s lawyer, said on CNN’s “State of the Union”: “Not that I am aware of.”
Pike, now 50, was 18 when she and her boyfriend tortured and killed a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in a jealous rage in 1995. She became one of the youngest women to be sent to death row.
Tennessee prison officials gave Pike two doses of the lethal injection drug on Wednesday night. The pentobarbital didn’t kill her, but her lawyers said her arms were burned and blistered from the caustic drugs.
Pike gave someone her medical power of attorney and that person is protecting her privacy, Ferrell said.
This was the second time this year Tennessee has not been able to execute a prisoner who was seemingly moments away from death. In May, Tennessee stopped the execution of Tony Carruthers after staff placed an IV into his right arm but couldn’t get a secondary IV line.
. . .It is unclear what will happen in her death penalty case. Pike’s lawyers have asked the governor to commute her punishment to a life sentence.
“If she recovers, she may not fully recover. And there may be issues about her competence,” Ferrell said.
The governor has suspended all executions, but only for the rest of the year. And if Pike remains comatose, the execution would turn out to be a life sentence under intubation, unless her medical guardian decides to pull the tube. The sick part of all this is that if she manages to revive, the state may well decide to kill her anyway. That is in fact what happened in the case of Robert Breechen in Oklahoma in 1995. Breechen tried to kill himself with an overdose of sedatives shortly before his scheduled execution. They rushed him to the hospital, revived him, and then executed him, only two hours behind schedule. I vehemently oppose state-sanctioned executions on several grounds, but if they are going to kill somebody, they should use a tried and true method, like the firing squad or guillotine. But that’s too gory for the government!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,
Hili: Don’t make me laugh now. Andrzej: Why?
Hili: Because I’m trying to look really serious.
In Polish:
Hili: Nie rozśmieszaj mnie teraz.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Bo próbuję wyglądać bardzo poważnie.
From Masih; a heartbreaking execution of an Iranian protestor. Just before he was to be hanged, he had a heart attack. They put him back in a cell, and then he got married over the phone. They then hanged him the day after his wedding:
They married by phone from separate prison cells. They executed a groom the morning after his wedding.
Alireza Sepahi and Mahshad Kashani were engaged before they were arrested during Iran’s January uprising. Mahshad, just 22, was sentenced to five years in prison. Alireza was sentenced to death.
The day before his execution, they were married over the phone. Their fathers listened as the vows were read.
No embrace.
No kiss.
No holding hands.
Just two voices saying “I do” through a prison telephone, while the Islamic Republic was preparing the gallows.
This was not the first time they tried to kill him. In July, Alireza was taken to be publicly hanged. Minutes before reaching the gallows, under enormous psychological pressure, he suffered a heart attack. They rushed him to hospital.
Then they sent him back to prison.
Today, they came back for him.
This morning, the Islamic Republic hanged Alireza Sepahi.
He was 25 years old.
For one day, he had a wife.
He never got to hold her as his wife. He never got to kiss her goodbye.
Think about the cruelty of a regime that is so terrified of young people that it cannot even tolerate their love.
💔
This four-year-old Dutch Jewish girl, along with her mother and little brother, were gassed to death as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz. Klara would be 87 today had she lived.
We have a new branch in the family tree of animals: Atreyea- a previously unrecognized lineage among the closest unicell relatives of animals.Led by @konsmitsi.bsky.social & @freejakoba.bsky.social together with a fantastic team of collaborators.🔗 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers….#protistsOnSky
Today’s song was chosen by my friend Tim, who knows his soul songs. This Motown number, “Since I Lost My Baby,” is performed by the Temptations but was written by Smokey Robinson and Peter Moore. Tim likes it because, he says, it shows what life is like: what a spurned lover would really feel—even though the bosses are paying. It came out in 1965, and here’s a bit from Wikipedia:
Longing and melancholy, “Since I Lost My Baby” tells a story about the pain of losing a lover. Temptations lead singer David Ruffin, portrays the song’s narrator, bass singer Melvin Franklin is also heard out front after each of Ruffin’s first two lines on the first verse. It was Ruffin’s third straight lead on a Temptations single.
Cash Box described it as a “tender, slow-shufflin’ pop-r&b tearjerker about a lad who has been singing the blues since his romance went kaput.”
