April 30, 2026
"Great king," says Trump, pointing at Charles. "The greatest king in my book."
"Limiting food and water has been used to hasten death in people dying at home since long before it had a formal name."
From "She Didn’t Want to Live With Advanced Dementia. So Why Was She Being Kept Alive? Some consider the regular feeding of late-stage dementia patients to be nonnegotiable. Others see it as extending life unnecessarily" (NYT).
"King Charles tames Maga but Britain’s still in the doghouse."
That's the headline at the London Times. Subheadline: "While the monarch has gone down a storm with President Trump’s VIPs, his US visit seems to have done nothing to help Sir Keir Starmer."
I guess "gone down a storm" is a British expression. I'm going to assume it means something like: was a big sensation. Yeah, that's right. I checked with A.I. The American expression that's equally mystifying to an outsider would be: brought the house down.
Speaking of house... in the doghouse seems to work in both countries.
Now, let me find the meat of this article:"Mills attempted to blunt Platner’s momentum this spring by running ads bringing up controversy around deleted Reddit comments he made years ago downplaying the seriousness of sexual assault."
From "Maine Gov. Janet Mills drops out of race to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins/The seat is critical to Democrats’ hopes of retaking the Senate. Graham Platner, an oyster farmer and Democrat, is likely to win the primary" (WaPo).
"Plants depend on carbon dioxide to perform photosynthesis — but that doesn’t mean they grow better when there’s more carbon in the air, scientists say."
"A sweeping survey of changes among 32 compounds in 43 crops found that nearly every plant that humans eat is harmed by rising CO2 levels. 'As a scientist, it’s really interesting,' said Sterre F. ter Haar, an environmental scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead author of the survey, published in November. 'As a person … you don’t want to see such a shift, because it’s so negative.' For the past several years, ter Haar and her colleagues have worked to compile a database of all existing research on nutrient changes linked to rising CO2.... Next the team used their dataset to calculate the nutritional densities of each crop under different carbon dioxide levels — and to predict how their composition could continue to shift in the future. On average, they found, nutrients have already decreased by an average 3.2 percent across all plants since the late 1980s, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 350 parts per million...."
From "Carbon pollution is making food less nutritious" (WaPo). That's a gift link, so you can figure out the science and whether this is a case of lying with statistics.
It occurs to me that percentages of nutrients would change if plants just contain more water, but a plant composed of more water might be more appetizing, so just eat a bit more of it. I'm always suspicious of articles that stir up climate-change anxiety.
"Amazon Discusses ‘Apprentice’ Reboot—With Don Jr. as a Potential Host."
The Wall Street Journal reports.
Interesting, but there is no reason at all to think that Don Jr. has what it takes to assume the role his father played. Schwarzenegger couldn't do it, and Schwarzenegger brought his famous charisma and media-and-politics know-how to the project. The only reason for anyone other than Donald Trump to do "The Apprentice" is to prove the unique skill and talent of our very special President, Donald Trump.
"The ballroom is, to the confusion of many, a top priority for Trump. Indeed, it has been one since long before he launched himself into politics."
"With those beautiful ears of yours — he's got great hearing."
Periodista : pregunta de la nasa
— ElBuni (@therealbuni) April 30, 2026
Trump: el mas indicado para responderte es el director de la NASA con esas orejas que tiene, escucha re bien, tiene oido de gato😳
*le hacen zoom a las orejas* pic.twitter.com/SGUOv46qmo
April 29, 2026
"The justices, split along ideological lines, ruled that the voting map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander."
From "Live Updates: Supreme Court Strikes Down Louisiana Map in Voting Rights Case" (NYT).
Although the justices struck down Louisiana’s map, the court’s conservative majority upheld the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act itself. Voting rights groups had feared that the court might use the case to gut the remaining provisions of the landmark civil rights law.
AND: Here's the opinion: Louisiana v. Callais. It's 6-3, in the usual way, and Justice Alito writes for the majority.
"Lonardo met Skiles’s biological mother, Cheryl Brown, in the late 1970s while they were both stationed at Fort Dix. During a weekend off..."
"[T]he organizations producing that data are cooking the books so they can smear the Right with the Left's crimes."
You can't fix a problem if your diagnosis hinges on blaming its victims. If the Democrats actually care to tackle political violence, the Left needs to own up to the fact that it is responsible for inculcating a culture of violence that targets the Right. https://t.co/VaOPejzOQI
— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) April 29, 2026
"Jack Schossshhhhberg is that kind of leader."
Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of John F. Kennedy, has built his campaign for a New York City House seat around turning the page on the Democrats’ old guard. Yet when he debuts his first paid advertisement on Wednesday, the 33-year-old candidate has chosen his party’s oldest living leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, to do the talking....
He's turning the page. She's the page.
"Tapestries embroidered with Quranic verses were shipped from the Kaaba in Mecca, Islam’s holiest shrine. Tiles came from a mosque in Uzbekistan."
From "Epstein Obtained Objects From Islam’s Holiest Site for His Island 'Mosque'/Jeffrey Epstein’s messages cast light on an unusual building on his private island and show how his connections helped him secure tapestries from Mecca for it" (NYT)(gift link).
"His vision for an island shrine began while he was in a Palm Beach County, Fla., jail, having pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution. Before his release in 2009, Mr. Epstein hired architects to design a 'hammam,' a Turkish bathhouse surrounded by 'Islamic gardening,' according to his correspondence. Mr. Epstein’s records show that in 2013, he sent Mr. Nicola a picture of the Yalbugah Hammam, a 15th-century bathhouse in Aleppo, Syria, with a golden dome, a recessed arch over the door and striped masonry, seeking sketches that would resemble it. Among other tasks, Mr. Epstein asked for a design replacing the Arabic word for God with his initials in English. 'Remember we saw the aribic writing in black and white,' he wrote to Mr. Nicola in an email plagued with his customary typos and misspellings. 'instead of allah, i thought j’s and e ‘s.'"







