The forecast is pretty bleak this weekend for the camping trip I planned. T-storms, cloudy, below average temps for this time of year. (I like it hot)
Gotta schlepp all that gear out of the car.
Sad.
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Over at The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza breaks down what it means that Robert Mueller asked to empanel a Grand Jury a few weeks ago. It's not just a formality. He may think he has enough evidence for a criminal charges and the fact that the members will be from D.C. may signal that he's gunning for a conviction if he gets an indictment.
Grand juries don’t investigate hoaxes, and there are rules against using them for anything resembling a political witch hunt. As several former federal prosecutors told me, the grand jury is significant because it means that Mueller is in the midst of a “predicated” criminal investigation. That is, he has reached the point where he has evidence of criminal conduct. “It can’t be used for a fishing expedition,” Matt Olsen, a former federal prosecutor, said. “He’s got a very powerful tool to pursue specific federal crimes.”
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Martin Shkreli, the Pharma venture capitalist and "entrepreneur" that all of the lab rats love to hate for his evil schemes to make otherwise cheap generic drugs unaffordable to those people who need them and may not have insurance, has been convicted of securities fraud. How did he do it? He raided his biotech startup for funds to pay his hedge fund investors.
Tremendous.
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Have you ever wondered what Ötzi, the alpine snow mummy had for lunch? Wonder no more:
Last week, a paper in Scientific Reports described another recent find, of an object four thousand years old: a circular box, several inches wide, made of willow and pine and sewn together with twigs. It was discovered, in 2012, near the summit of Switzerland’s Lötschenpass, almost nine thousand feet up, and was dated to the Bronze Age. The recovery of a wooden artifact so old and well preserved would be remarkable under any circumstances, but this one contained something curious. “We saw that it has this amorphous glob in the middle of it,” Jessica Hendy, an archeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and one of the paper’s co-authors, told me. She and her colleagues, led by André Colonese, of the University of York, analyzed the glob using a technique typically reserved for ceramics; it detects the presence of fats, revealing if a clay pot once contained, say, dairy or meat. But this time, and for the first time in the history of archeology, the analysis showed traces of grain—“some sort of wheat,” Hendy said, and barley or rye. Science outlets promptly began referring to the artifact as a lunchbox.
Mmmmmm, amorphous globs of grain substance. With an apple carrot purée and radicchio slaw?
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