‘No person should have to be subjected to what Clinton dealt with on Sunday and, more important, no great democratic nation should be subjected to it either…’

Source: Michael Cohen, The Boston Globe op-ed

‘The Florida Supreme Court ruled that the state’s death penalty sentencing procedures were unconstitutional, effectively ending the death penalty, for now…’

Source: Pacific Standard

‘…Unfortunately, the record was hit right before the Alcator C-Mod reactor, the world’s only compact, high-magnetic field fusion reactor of the tokamak design, was pulled offline for good. After 23 years of operation, the Department of Energy has canceled its support for MIT’s record-smashing device due to the fact that a gigantic, $30 billion superconducting reactor in France, called ITER, is now devouring the lion’s share of our fusion research dollars. Depending on who you talk to, ITER is either the future of fusion energy, or a bloated, bureaucratic mess that’ll stall progress in the field for the next twenty years. Either way, MIT’s fusion program, which has over the years attracted some of the most brilliant minds in plasma physics, has effectively been castrated…’

Source: Gizmodo

Via Upworthy:

‘People across the political spectrum condemned the attack.’

You’ll either believe that Dems came to the aid of the firebombed Republican office out of a fierce devotion to democratic principles or because they saw a tremendous P.R. opportunity.

In fact, wouldn’t Trump, suffused with conspiracy theory rhetoric about the rigging of the election, insist that the point of the firebombing was to provide Clinton’s forces with just such an opportunity to save the day?

‘In Pale Fire, Nabokov notes an “absolutely extraordinary, unbelievably elegant” verbal curiosity: “A newspaper account of a Russian tsar’s coronation had, instead of korona (crown), the misprint vorona (crow), and when next day this was apologetically ‘corrected,’ it got misprinted a second time as korova (cow). “

The artistic correlation between the crown-crow-cow series and the Russian korona–vorona–korova series is something that would have, I am sure, enraptured my poet,” he wrote. “I have seen nothing like it on lexical playfields and the odds against the double coincidence defy computation.” ‘

Source: Futility Closet

‘For the first time in more than 125 years, the Arizona Republic endorsed a Democrat: Hillary Clinton. Some of the paper’s readers responded with death threats — and worse. Editor Mi-Ai Parrish’s response is as classy a civics lesson as you could ask for.’

Source: Boing Boing

‘One of Julian Assange’s only ways of communicating with the outside world from within the Ecuadorian Embassy in London has been disconnected, according to WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks claims that a “state actor” has cut off Assange’s internet access, with the group’s Twitter account confirming on the morning of October 17 that Assange’s connection has been “intentionally severed” and contingency plans are being activated. It’s unclear what those contingency plans may be and Motherboard was unable to verify Wikileaks’ claim. The Ecuadorian Embassy also did not immediately provide Motherboard with any more information.

WikiLeaks’ tweet came after the organisation posted on Sunday night what were rumored to be the “dead man keys” to documents; encryption keys that would allow for the publication of leaked documents. Users on Twitter and Reddit suggested that these tweets indicated Assange had been killed, and that these documents should be revealed in the wake of his death.

But these rumors were shut down by WikiLeaks’ Kelly Kolisnik. “Julian Assange is alive and well,” Kolisnik tweeted. “Rumors circulating that he tweeted out a ‘Dead Mans’ switch are completely false and baseless.”

And as Gizmodo points out, these 64-character codes are likely for “pre-commitment,” a way to prove that when documents are released in the future, their content has not been tampered with.

The flurry of rumors surrounding the state of Assange come as WikiLeaks continues to release documents related to hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign advisor, John Podesta. Assange, speaking earlier in October, said that he would aim to publish documents on a weekly basis in the run up to Election Day on November 8…’

Source: Motherboard

As Trump puffs “We can’t let them get away with it, folks” in incitement, his followers are increasingly calling for “revolution” and “bloodshed”.

Source: Pacific Standard

‘This week, an emergency room in the Pacific Northwest was briefly quarantined after five people—including two police officers and a hospital worker—experienced mysterious hallucinations from an unidentified illness believed to be spread by touch. According to Oregon Live, the enigmatic incident began early Wednesday morning when a 54-year-old caregiver in North Bend, Oregon, called police to report seven or eight people “trying to take the roof off her vehicle.” Police say they found nothing, but after the caregiver reported the unseen vandals a second time, sheriff’s deputies escorted her to a nearby hospital for suspected hallucinations.

Shortly afterward, however, one of the deputies began experiencing similar symptoms and returned to the hospital. Soon after that, the other deputy, a hospital worker and the caregiver’s 78-year-old patient also began hallucinating and were hospitalized. A hazmat team was subsequently deployed to both the hospital and the initial residence, but was unable to locate a common source of contamination. Blood tests also failed to find anything unusual. “The vehicles, equipment and uniforms have been checked with no contaminates identified or located on or about them.” Authorities say the investigation is ongoing…’

Source: Gizmodo

Mysterious environmental contaminant or mass hysteria?