The engineering degree to defense industry pipeline.

Through her early research, Szabo learned that by the 13th century, Icelanders were so dependent on whales that they wrote complicated laws to establish how washed-up whales were divvied up. A whale’s size, how it died, and who owned the property where it beached all determined who got a share of the whale meat. Portioning also depended on who secured it to the shore; if an Icelander saw a dead whale floating in the sea, they were legally obligated to find a way to tether it to land. And hunters not only marked their spears with their signature emblem, they also registered those emblems with the government, improving the chances that they could claim their lawful share of any whale they speared. In addition to consuming whale meat and blubber, Norse people used the bones as tools, vessels, gaming pieces, furniture, and beams for roofs and walls.

For Virginians facing criminal convictions with plea deals on the table, the unalienable constitutional rights they typically enjoy suddenly become negotiable. Under state law, prosecutors can ask people to sign away their Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure in exchange for reduced charges or sentencing. Black Virginians are much more likely than their white counterparts to get plea deals that waive these rights, which can open people up to random and invasive police searches long after they’ve resolved their cases. In the capital city of Richmond, 96 percent of people who agreed to waive their Fourth Amendment rights in 2020 were people of color, data obtained by Bolts show. The city’s population was 45 percent Black and eight percent Hispanic. That same year in Lynchburg, Virginia, the second largest city, Black people accounted for 78 percent of all plea waivers signed, while they only made up 28 percent of the population. The practice, known as a Fourth Amendment waiver, permits police to search a person, their home, or vehicle for a specified number of years after a conviction, even if they’ve completed their sentence of incarceration or parole, and regardless of proof they committed a crime. People living under the waiver cannot challenge the legality of anything police find during a search. Lengths of the waivers can stretch long beyond probationary periods—prosecutors have ordered some people to waive their Fourth Amendment rights for as long as 20 years, according to data obtained by Virginia advocacy group Justice Forward through public records requests and shared with Bolts.

President Joe Biden’s top advisers are all too aware the ghosts of 1968 may haunt their convention here, but they’re grappling with a pair of more urgent and thoroughly modern-day challenges as summer nears: How far can they go in reprising their virtual 2020 convention to mitigate the threat of disruption inside the arena, and how will they navigate a rookie mayor who unabashedly sympathizes with protesters? Trumpeting the success of their Covid-era convention four years ago, some in Biden’s orbit are aggressively pushing to make the 2024 conclave a hybrid production. That would mean in-person speeches from the president, party luminaries and rising stars to draw television attention alongside a mix of pre-recorded testimonials and videos from other parts of the country. The goal: drive maximum viewership on television and the internet while minimizing live programming and openings for protest in Chicago’s United Center. This would mean moving party business, such as rules and platform votes, off the floor and denying would-be demonstrators a chance to seize on contentious debates. While the Biden campaign, White House and convention planners have only just started hatching plans, senior Democrats tell me they’re discussing whether to conduct such business before the convention even begins or move it out of the arena and across town to McCormick Place, their other Chicago venue. Serendipitously, Biden’s advisers may have a very good reason to move up such housekeeping: If the Ohio Legislature does not relax its ballot certification deadline, which is before the Democrats’ August convention, the DNC may have no choice but to technically nominate the president before the conclave begins.

In 2021, the writer Fabian Wolff published a long essay in Die Zeit entitled “Only in Germany.” It is a sterling example of an increasingly popular essay genre he spells out in the second paragraph: “I am a Jew in Germany.” “I don’t enjoy writing this in German, a language I often experience as a burden,” the essay begins. Wolff’s family history has gifted him “the famous packed suitcase under the bed,” he writes. “Why is everything so goddamn German in Germany?” he wonders... In July 2023, Wolff published a rambling, evasive mea culpa in Die Zeit that has produced an even greater sensation than his “Only in Germany” essay. It could be succinctly summarized as: I am not a Jew in Germany. Wolff reveals that he has no Jewish ancestry. It was an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Larry David believes he is not Jewish, he writes, that initially led him to inquire into a Jewish identity. “Mama, are we actually Jewish?” he recalls asking his mother afterwards. Not really, she responded, but there was a story about grandma. Wolff’s maternal grandmother’s grandmother was supposedly Jewish, a silver bullet of matrilineal descent across the upheavals of European Jewish history. “Suddenly,” he remembers, “everything seemed to make sense. I simply knew what it meant to be Jewish.” If the story were true, Wolff would have ethnically been one-sixteenth Jewish. But the story was not true: Wolff, alas, is sixteen parts Goy.

Anyone found guilty of selling or manufacturing cultivated meat in Alabama will face up to a three-month jail sentence and $500 fine.

The first Neuralink implant in a human malfunctioned after several threads recording neural activity retracted from the brain, the Elon Musk-owned startup revealed Wednesday.

Omar and his Pomeranian, Neptune, were separated when he was swept up in the City College protests and arrested. The protesters helped create a happy ending.

On April 17, a UNC Board of Governors’ committee voted unanimously to repeal the diversity, equity, and inclusion policies the UNC System adopted in 2019. If the full board ratifies the decision later this month, the system and its 17 institutions will no longer have to employ diversity officers or work toward diversity goals. The committee’s decision came without discussion or public comment, but it wasn’t entirely unexpected. Texas and Florida recently eliminated their universities’ DEI programs, and North Carolina’s Republican legislative leaders signaled that they’d follow suit if the board didn’t act. Board of Governors member Woody White hasn’t been so muted. On the day of the committee vote, White—a Wilmington lawyer and former state senator and county commissioner who was appointed last year—argued in a Carolina Journal op-ed that DEI “has severely damaged race relations.”

UCLA’s campus echoed with screams and bangs amid violence. “I’d seen something like I’ve never seen before and something that I never would expect to happen – not in the United States, not in California and certainly not in Los Angeles and on campus,” said Ismael Sindha, an alumnus who was in the Palestine solidarity encampment at UCLA on April 30. “I saw people bleeding from their heads. I saw people on the floor. I saw people crying.” From late in the evening of April 30 to early May 1, the Palestine solidarity encampment in Dickson Plaza was attacked by more than 100 counter-protesters and aggressors who sprayed aerosol irritants, launched fireworks, tore away the encampment’s barricades and hit those inside with metal poles and wooden planks. At 12:12 a.m. on May 1, UCLA released a statement that it had immediately called law enforcement to campus, but LAPD officers did not begin directing the aggressors out of the area until 3 a.m. “At first, I could understand why there weren’t police officers immediately,” said Student A, who was in the encampment. “But an hour in, and then two hours in, and then three hours in, it just reached the point where I was like, ‘UCLA knows this is happening, and they don’t care enough to protect their students.’”

It's pretty much what you'd expect.

As Grants Pass, Oregon—and the nation—await a Supreme Court ruling on just how far cities can police the homeless, a volunteer mayor and her unhoused constituents try to weather the backlash. But there is often little daylight between Democrats and Republicans in their efforts to engineer cities as sundown towns. It wasn’t Idaho where unhoused people first called on the Eighth Amendment to protect themselves from criminalization; that distinction was California’s. In a 2007 settlement, the court struck down 41.18, Los Angeles’s “sit-lie” law, a ban on sitting, sleeping, lying, and storing property in public. San Francisco now boasts 24 unique anti-homeless laws. Recent reports show unhoused people account for a disproportionate number of arrests, even in liberal strongholds: one in six in L.A., and one in two in Portland. Liberal politicians appease their housed constituents by empowering them to personally order encampment sweeps. Alongside Amazon packages, DoorDash dinners, and movies on HBO, residents can now expect policing on demand. In this model, UCLA assistant professor of sociology Chris Herring said, constituent emails and 311 calls drive police enforcement. In 2017, complaints from San Francisco residents directed police to address “homeless concerns” nearly 100,000 times. In 2020, San Francisco Mayor London Breed texted the police chief to clear specific people in her line of sight. “Man sleeping on bench on Hayes st near gough,” one text declared. “Can someone come ASAP. I’m in the area having lunch.” Liberal cities met Martin not as an opportunity to diversify their efforts to house people, but to creatively remove them within the confines of the law. In 2021, Los Angeles updated its sit-lie law with exclusion zones—around parks, schools, libraries, underpasses, and shelters—which effectively if not technically blanket the city. Other cities responded to Martin’s demand that unhoused people need “alternative” places to sleep before they can be ticketed or arrested by codifying it into a cold calculus of beds versus tents. Both San Diego and Las Vegas now issue misdemeanors for camping if shelter space exists. “The right to shelter must be paired with the obligation to use it,” Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg has said. In other words, unhoused people must accept shelter at the penalty of fines or imprisonment.

Joseph Weizenbaum’s underrated book “Computer Power and Human Reason” cautioned against confusing people with machines.

A Mid-Michigan woman is looking for a new home after police kicked her out of her previous dwelling… inside of a grocery store sign. Contractors working on the Family Fare grocery store in Midland last week “unexpectedly found a woman, 34, living inside the rooftop sign,” according to a report from the Midland Daily News.

A new coalition of Christian nationalist groups is mobilizing congregations to take over Texas school boards.

The rappers’ fiery diss-battle has raised allegations of domestic violence and sex abuse – but for the wrong reasons

Emperor Karl I was the least successful and most tragic Habsburg monarch. A symposium in Texas makes the case for why he should become a saint.

Reuven Kahane, a 57-year-old man, drove a car into a crowd of protesters on Tuesday morning at a picket organized by Columbia University Apartheid Divest in front of Barnard trustee Francine LeFrak’s home, a New York Police Department spokesperson told Spectator. Police arrested three individuals at the demonstration, including Kahane and the 55-year-old female protester he struck, who sustained a leg injury and was hospitalized. She and a 63-year-old male protester with CUAD were arrested for banging on the hood of the driver’s car when it drove into the crowd, the spokesperson said. The two protesters and Kahane remained in police custody as of 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday. As of Wednesday morning, Kahane was charged with one count of assault with intent to cause physical injury with a weapon, a class D felony. He is reportedly related to Meir Kahane, a rabbi and Israeli right-wing extremist who was assassinated in New York City in 1990. The 55-year-old protester, a Columbia alum, was arrested for attempted criminal mischief in the fourth degree and unlawful assembly, which are class A and class B misdemeanors, respectively. The 63-year-old protester was arrested for attempted criminal mischief in the fourth degree, a class A misdemeanor.

On June 28, 1997, Mike Tyson infamously chomped off a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear in the third round of the heavyweight boxing championship. Nearly three decades later, John Klene and Eduardo Dumbrique — then 18 and 15 — remember exactly where they were when it happened: They were at Klene’s family home watching the fight, surrounded by friends. But that alibi, with its multiple witnesses, wasn’t enough to keep the teens out of prison when Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department investigators wrongly accused them of murder. After 23 years behind bars based on what their lawyers described as “lies” and “made up evidence,” they were exonerated in 2021. They filed a federal lawsuit the following year. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a $24-million settlement for the pair, who are both free now.

Exclusive: Survey of hundreds of experts reveals harrowing picture of future, but they warn climate fight must not be abandoned