“In a surprisingly strong performance, right-wing outsider candidate Abelardo de la Espriella will face leftist candidate senator Iván Cepeda in a June runoff election to decide Colombia’s presidency, setting the stage for a battle over the country’s political future and the direction of its relationships with key international partners, including the United States. With more than 99% of the votes counted in Sunday’s first round of the presidential election, de la Espriella won the most ballots with 43.74% of the vote, falling short of the absolute majority required to win outright in the contest. Cepeda, representing the left-wing Historic Pact coalition, was in second place with 40.90%. The left Democratic Center candidate Paloma Valencia was trailing well behind with 6.92%, according to preliminary results released by the National Civil Registry.” (05/31/26)
“If the proliferation of AI writing is a problem, it’s not because it’s terrible slop unfit for human consumption; it’s a problem because in some specific ways, it’s too good. It is the literary equivalent of fast food: convenient, cheap, hyper-consistent and relentlessly optimized to tickle our pleasure centers. Sure, AI produces some crazy metaphors and weird hallucinations, because the models have all of our text and none of our context. On the other hand, AI is really good at optimizing for readability, both stylistically and structurally. … as with fast food, what people want now isn’t necessarily good for them in the long run.” (05/31/26)
“The nostalgia for a 1950s ‘mom, dad, two kids, Chevy four-door, well-manicured lawn around a tidy cottage’ way of life is not nostalgia for ‘the old days,’ let alone for the days shortly after ‘the creation of the world.’ It’s nostalgia for post-World-War-2 Pasadena, California.” (05/31/26)
“A Spain-bound United Airlines flight out of Newark turned around mid-flight on Saturday because a teenager named his Fitbit ‘bomb’ and it popped up on available Bluetooth devices, officials and sources said. The plane took off from Newark Liberty International Airport at about 6 p.m., but landed back at Newark by roughly 9:30 p.m after security was flagged to inspect a suspicious Bluetooth device onboard that showed up as ‘bomb,’ sources told The Post. The flight was turned around and landed back in Newark late Saturday after passengers were directed to turn off their devices and the alarming name remained online. It was later determined that the device was a name for a Fitbit owned by a 16-year-old on board.” [editor’s note: Obviously, even if a real bomber was going to use Bluetooth to control a real bomb, the device name would be “ThisDeviceIsTotallyNotABomb” – TLK] (05/31/26)
“The Libertarian National Committee has voted to disaffiliate the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire, making one of the newly seated committee’s first acts a break with an affiliate that had become a serious point of controversy inside the national party. … A recording of the meeting, though sometimes hard to hear, shows national committee members referencing the New Hampshire affiliate’s public endorsement of Donald Trump during the 2024 election, its criticism of Libertarian candidates, and what the national party called a repeated promotion of ‘anti-libertarian positions’ at the national level. … The affiliate argues that the LNC acted without notice and without its representatives present, as well as without evidence that its current leadership violated party bylaws or libertarian principles.” (05/29/26)
“Ukraine launched fresh strikes on Russian energy sites overnight into Sunday, Russian authorities and media reported, while Kyiv denied Russian claims that a Ukrainian drone struck a key Kremlin-occupied nuclear plant. Drone debris set fire to a fuel storage facility in Russia’s southwestern Rostov region, Gov. Yuriy Slyusar reported on Telegram on Sunday. He said residents of nearby homes were evacuated. The drones also damaged civilian infrastructure in Saratov province, also in southwestern Russia, according to Gov. Roman Busargin. Astra, an independent Russian news channel, said an oil refinery was on fire in the regional capital, Saratov. … Meanwhile, Kyiv denied Russia’s claims that a Ukrainian drone struck the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, the largest in Ukraine and Europe.” (05/31/26)
“Some of the recent legal challenges to the use of surveillance by the Department of Homeland Security upon Americans have resulted in the revelation of truly terrifying behavior by the government, in direct defiance of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. We now know that the federal government spies on innocent Americans without suspicion and without warrants.” (05/29/26)
“A novel pill helped people with advanced pancreatic cancer live longer, researchers report, raising hopes of long-needed better treatments for one of the deadliest types of cancer. ‘While not curing the cancer, it is a very large step forward,’ says Dr. Zev Wainberg, of the University of California, Los Angeles, who helped lead the study. The drug is called daraxonrasib and it blocks a mutated protein that fuels tumor growth in more than 90% of pancreatic cancer cases — a target that had eluded treatment for decades. The daily pills nearly doubled survival time, with fewer severe side effects, in a study that randomly assigned the experimental drug or more chemotherapy to 500 patients whose metastatic, or spreading, cancer had quit responding to prior treatment. The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the American Society for Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago.” (05/31/26)
