Armed protesters have taken over government-owned structures on a wildlife refuge in Oregon, which is only the latest in the series of extreme actions that conspiracy theorists have taken in response to government initiatives related to the seemingly mundane issue of livestock grazing fees. In other news:
- A popular online petition asking President Obama to pardon Steven Avery, the maybe-falsely-accused subject of the Netflix documentery Making a Murderer, is not going to work because Avery wasn’t convicted of a federal crime.
- Saudi Arabia executed a radical Shiite cleric, which enraged some hardline Shiites in Iran who then attacked the Saudi embassy in Tehran, which has created widespread Middle East diplomatic chaos and is all an unfortunate reminder that Saudi Arabia and Iran still consider each other bigger enemies than ISIS.
- A two-year-old boy who drowned is believed to be the first refugee to have died in 2016.
- A judge ruled that Bill Cosby’s wife Camille must testify in the civil case against him.
- Donald Trump’s first television ad is a predictably caveman-like display of poor/nonexistent argumentative reasoning.
- And four new elements were added to the periodic table: Give it up for ununtrium (number 113), ununpentium (115), ununseptium (117) and ununoctium (118)! (Those names are just placeholders; they’ll get less unwieldy monikers sometime this year.)
Haqve a good day out there.
